Abstract
Gender and age have been found to affect adults’ audio-visual (AV) speech perception. However, research on adult aging focuses on adults over 60 years, who have an increasing likelihood for cognitive and sensory decline, which may confound positive effects of age-related AV-experience and its interaction with gender. Observed age and gender differences in AV speech perception may also depend on measurement sensitivity and AV task difficulty. Consequently both AV benefit and visual influence were used to measure visual contribution for gender-balanced groups of young (20–30 years) and middle-aged adults (50–60 years) with task difficulty varied using AV syllables from different talkers in alternative auditory backgrounds. Females had better speech-reading performance than males. Whereas no gender differences in AV benefit or visual influence were observed for young adults, visually influenced responses were significantly greater for middle-aged females than middle-aged males. That speech-reading performance did not influence AV benefit may be explained by visual speech extraction and AV integration constituting independent abilities. Contrastingly, the gender difference in visually influenced responses in middle adulthood may reflect an experience-related shift in females’ general AV perceptual strategy. Although young females’ speech-reading proficiency may not readily contribute to greater visual influence, between young and middle-adulthood recurrent confirmation of the contribution of visual cues induced by speech-reading proficiency may gradually shift females AV perceptual strategy toward more visually dominated responses.
Highlights
That the current study found gender differences in visual influence for middle-aged adults and replicated the frequently reported finding that females, independent of age, are better speech-readers than males (e.g., Johnson et al, 1988; Dancer et al, 1994; Watson et al, 1996; Strelnikov et al, 2009) suggests that gender differences in speech-reading may be observed in young adulthood, age-related changes in AV experience may be needed for such visual proficiency to influence the general AV perceptual strategy
Middle-aged females gave more visually influenced responses than middle-aged males across stop consonants and talkers
Summary
Behavioral research has reported gender (e.g., Dancer et al, 1994; Öhrström and Traunmüller, 2004; Irwin et al, 2006; Strelnikov et al, 2009) and age (e.g., Sommers et al, 2005; Winneke and Phillips, 2011) differences in the utilization of visual speech. Studies on age-related effects on visual speech have almost exclusively focused on differences between young and older adults (e.g., Sommers et al, 2005; Tye-Murray et al, 2007; Winneke and Phillips, 2011), and generally show that whereas older adults are poorer speech-readers than young adults, no age-related differences are reported for AV benefit, that is, use of visual speech to supplement auditory cues in AV speech perception.
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