Age-related changes in auditory processing may reduce physiological coding of acoustic cues, contributing to older adults’ difficulty perceiving speech in background noise. This study investigated whether older adults differed from young adults in patterns of acoustic cue weighting for categorizing vowels in quiet and in noise. All participants relied primarily on spectral quality to categorize /Ꜫ/ and /æ/ sounds in both listening conditions. However, relative to young adults, older adults exhibited greater reliance on duration and less reliance on spectral quality. These results suggest that aging alters patterns of perceptual cue weights that may influence speech recognition abilities.

Data were collected via Gorilla Experiment Builder and hosted on Prolific to obtain participant responses. Data was downloaded from Gorilla and R was used to remove the columns in the dataframe that were not necessary for analysis.