Sizing down the competition: Speaking style and word recognition

Abstract

Identifying words with many phonological neighbors is more challenging for older adults than for younger adults. This difference has been attributed to reductions in inhibitory control associated with aging, which impair older adults' ability to cope with competition from similar-sounding words (Sommers and Danielson, 1999). Many difficulties in speech identification can be alleviated, however, when speech is produced clearly (i.e., the style adopted naturally by speakers when they perceive that their interlocutors are having difficulty understanding them). The current study investigates whether the acoustic-phonetic enhancements of clear speech can also reduce the inhibitory challenge of word recognition. If so, it is predicted that listeners will receive a greater benefit from clear speech when identifying lexically difficult words (i.e., words with many neighbors) vs. lexically easy words (i.e., words with fewer neighbors). Younger and older adults performed a word-recognition task in noise. Results to date show that the clear speech benefit is indeed greater for lexically difficult words than for lexically easy words for both groups of listeners. This pattern of results suggests that clear speech reduces the inhibitory demands associated with word recognition by increasing the perceptual difference between phonological neighbors.