Department of English, School of Foreign Studies, Tongji University.
Psychol Aging. 2024 May;39(3):262-274. doi: 10.1037/pag0000811.
The redundancy hypothesis proposes that older listeners need a larger array of acoustic cues than younger listeners for effective speech perception. This research investigated this hypothesis by examining the aging effects on the use of prosodic cues in speech segmentation in Mandarin Chinese. We examined how younger and older listeners perceived prosodic boundaries using three main prosodic cues (pause, final lengthening, and pitch change) across eight conditions involving different cue combinations. The stimuli consisted of syntactically ambiguous phrase pairs, each containing two or three objects. Participants (22 younger listeners and 22 older listeners) performed a speech recognition task to judge the number of objects they heard. Both groups primarily relied on the pause cue for identifying prosodic boundaries, using final lengthening and pitch change as secondary cues. However, older listeners showed reduced sensitivity to these cues, compensating by integrating the primary cue pause with the secondary cue pitch change for more precise segmentation. The present study reveals older listeners' integration strategy in using prosodic cues for speech segmentation, supporting the redundancy hypothesis. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
冗余假设提出，老年人听众在有效的言语感知中比年轻人听众需要更多的声学线索。本研究通过考察普通话中韵律线索在言语分割中的使用对年龄的影响来检验这一假设。我们通过八种不同的线索组合条件，考察了年轻和老年听众如何使用三种主要的韵律线索（停顿、结尾拉长和音高变化）来感知韵律边界。刺激包括语法上模棱两可的短语对，每个短语对包含两个或三个物体。参与者（22 名年轻听众和 22 名老年听众）执行了一项言语识别任务，以判断他们听到的物体数量。两组参与者主要依赖停顿线索来识别韵律边界，同时将结尾拉长和音高变化作为次要线索。然而，老年听众对这些线索的敏感性降低，通过将主要线索停顿与次要线索音高变化相结合来进行更精确的分割，从而进行补偿。本研究揭示了老年听众在使用韵律线索进行言语分割时的整合策略，支持了冗余假设。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2024 APA，保留所有权利）。
