Prosodic influences on the perceptual organization of sentences by young and elderly listeners.

Abstract

Spoken sentences with normal or anomalous prosody (‘‘In her hope of marrying/ Anna was surely impractical.’’ versus ‘‘In her hope of marrying Anna/ was surely impractical.’’) were presented at speech rates of 187, 234, or 312 words per minute to young and elderly listeners. Elderly listeners’ recall was less accurate overall than young listeners’ recall, especially at higher speech rates. While recall of sentences with normal prosody was almost always near perfect, recall for sentences with anomalous prosody decreased as speech rate increased. Further analysis of listeners’ recall indicated that young listeners were more likely to restructure the prosody of the sentence to match the syntax they had heard. Elderly listeners, on the other hand, were more likely than younger listeners to restructure the syntax of the sentence so it would fit the prosody they had heard. Thus it appears that elderly listeners rely on prosodic information to help them organize sentences at a syntactic level to a greater degree than do younger listeners.