Skip to main content
Dryad

Young and older adult vowel categorization responses

Data files

Mar 14, 2024 version files 2.02 MB

Abstract

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.