Intonation perception problems in advanced age

Abstract

This study sought to determine whether intonation processing difficulties for elderly people are attributable to stimulus contextual factors. Participants were 20 old (61–84 years) and 15 young (19–29 years) adult native speakers of English. They were presented auditorily a total of 108 English sentences to decode following evaluation of their hearing abilities. Each sentence conveyed either positive or negative emotional meaning and was accompanied or unaccompanied by contextual information. Both groups of participants demonstrated significantly better outcomes on the decoding of the stimuli presented with contextual information (CS) compared to the decontextualized sentences (DCS). The elderly participants performed poorly relative to the young adults on the perception of positive and negative emotions in the DCS, as well as negative emotions in the CS. On the other hand, their performance on perception of positive emotion in the CS was comparable to that of the young adults. These findings are consistent with data that have shown that intonation meaning is context dependent [e.g., Woodland and Voyer, Metaphor Symbol 26, 227–239 (2011)], and that elderly people have greater amygdala activation for positive than negative stimuli [Mather et al., Psychol. Sci. 15, 259–263 (2004)]. They suggest that intonation perception problems in old age may be influenced by stimulus contextual information, but part of their origin may lie in neurobiological factors such as age related changes in the brain.