Speech rate and syntactic complexity as multiplicative factors in speech comprehension by young and older adults
- ISSN: 13825585
- DOI: 10.1076/anec.10.4.310.28974
Abstract
An experiment is reported in which young and older adults heard short English sentences that differed in syntactic complexity and speech rate. The syntactic contrast pitted center-embedded sentences with a subject-relative clause against sentences with center-embedded object-relative clauses. Speech rate was varied using computer time-compression of the speech signal. Both young and older adults showed poorer comprehension accuracy for the more complex object-relative clause sentences than subject-relative sentences, with an age difference appearing only when sentences were presented at a very rapid rate. By contrast to accuracy scores, older adults took longer than the young adults to give their comprehension responses at all speech rates tested, with this age difference amplified by both speech rate and syntactic complexity.
Speech rate and syntactic complexity as multiplicative factors in speech comprehension by young and older adults
Sign up today - FREE
Mendeley saves you time finding and organizing research. Learn more
- All your research in one place
- Add and import papers easily
- Access it anywhere, anytime