Non-native Speech Learning in Older Adults.

Erin M Ingvalson,Patrick C M Wong,Casandra Nowicki,Audrey Zong

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00148

Abstract

Though there is an extensive literature investigating the ability of younger adults to learn non-native phonology, including investigations into individual differences in younger adults’ lexical tone learning, very little is known about older adults’ ability to learn non-native phonology, including lexical tone. There are several reasons to suspect that older adults would use different learning mechanisms when learning lexical tone than younger adults, including poorer perception of dynamic pitch, greater reliance on working memory capacity in second language learning, and poorer category learning in older adulthood. The present study examined the relationships among older adults’ baseline sensitivity for pitch patterns, working memory capacity, and declarative memory capacity with their ability to learn to associate tone with lexical meaning. In older adults, baseline pitch pattern sensitivity was not associated with generalization performance. Rather, older adults’ learning performance was best predicted by declarative memory capacity. These data suggest that training paradigms will need to be modified to optimize older adults’ non-native speech sound learning success.

Highlights

Though there is an extensive literature investigating non-native speech learning in younger adults, very little is known about the non-native speech learning abilities of older adults
There are several reasons to believe that older adults may show different learning outcomes, and different learning mechanisms, for lexical tone compared to younger adults
We entered the Perception Test (PCPT), the standardized scores from the three Woodcock–Johnson subtests, and the standardized scores from the two Wechsler Memory Scale subtests into six 2 × 2 ANOVAs to determine if there were any differences between the high-aptitude listeners (HAL) and low-aptitude listeners (LAL) groups or between the multi- and single-talker training conditions on these variables

Summary

Introduction

Though there is an extensive literature investigating non-native speech learning in younger adults, very little is known about the non-native speech learning abilities of older adults One place where this disparity is apparent is in investigations of lexical tone. It has been shown that listeners with poor baseline sensitivity for non-lexical pitch patterns have improved learning outcomes by reducing the acoustic variability in the training context (Perrachione et al, 2011). There are several reasons to believe that older adults may show different learning outcomes, and different learning mechanisms, for lexical tone compared to younger adults The first of these is the difficulty older adults, even those who have normal hearing, have perceiving dynamic pitch

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