Examining use of context in sentences: The recruitment of perceptual and cognitive-linguistic abilities in younger and older adults

Abstract

Auditory-verbal contextual information facilitates speech recognition. In everyday listening, perceptual and cognitive-linguistic abilities influence speech recognition, but the role of these abilities in contextual use remains unclear. To assess the use of context, younger and older adults listened to sentences in multitalker babble and identified the final words from either high- or low-predictability sentence frames; difference scores between the two conditions indicate use of context. We also assessed (1) speech processing abilities, including masking release, talker segregation, and auditory-verbal closure, (2) cognitive abilities, including memory, inhibition, and speed of processing, and (3) linguistic abilities, assessed through verbal fluency and vocabulary knowledge. Compared to younger adults, older adults had better contextual use and vocabulary knowledge but had poorer recognition of final words with increasing age. These measures, combined with thresholds and age, were entered as predictor variables to explain performance for high- and low-context sentences. Preliminary results indicate that vocabulary knowledge and auditory-verbal closure were associated with contextual use and final word recognition in low-context sentences, respectively. Final word recognition in high-context sentences involved a combination of abilities. Thus, recruitment of perceptual and cognitive-linguistic abilities depends, in part, on the availability of sentence context. [Work supported by NIH/NIDCD.]