ABSTRACT
Young and older adults heard sentences in which one character was describing another character ("The doctor said the nurse is thirsty"), where the character being described could be determined only by the prosodic pattern in which the sentence was heard. Using computer editing, the authors generated sentences that were heard with either one (Experiment 1) or two (Experiment 2) of three ordinarily co-occurring prosodic features reduced (pitch variation, amplitude variation, timing variation). For both age groups, timing variation was the most valuable of the three prosodic features. These results add to our understanding of the effective preservation of spoken language comprehension in normal aging.
Subject(s)
Aging/psychology , Comprehension/physiology , Speech Acoustics , Acoustic Stimulation , Adult , Aged , Aged, 80 and over , Aging/physiology , Female , Humans , Male , Mental Recall/physiology , Middle Aged , Pitch Perception/physiology , Psycholinguistics , Semantics , Speech Discrimination Tests , Speech Perception/physiologyABSTRACT
Although deficits in confrontation naming are a common consequence of damage to the language areas of the left cerebral hemisphere, some patients with aphasia show relatively good naming ability. We measured effects of repeated practice on naming latencies for a set of pictured objects by three aphasic patients with near-normal naming ability and by neurologically intact young and older adults. While the non-injured participants showed a systematic reduction in overall mean latencies and reduced trial-to-trial latency variability, the aphasic patients did not. Examination of the latency distributions suggests that successful naming by aphasic patients may come about by different underlying operations.
