Vowel identification by younger and older listeners: Relative effectiveness of vowel edges and vowel centers

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2010-09, Vol.128 (3), p.EL105-EL110
• Main Authors: DONALDSON, Gail S, TALMAGE, Elizabeth K, ROGERS, Catherine L
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation; Adolescent; Adult; Age Factors; Aged; Aging; Audiometry, Pure-Tone; Auditory Threshold; Biological and medical sciences; Cues; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Jasa Express Letters; Language; Male; Middle Aged; Production and perception of spoken language; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Signal Detection, Psychological; Sound Spectrography; Speech Acoustics; Speech Perception; Time Factors; Young Adult
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/1.3469768

Young normal-hearing (YNH) and older normal-hearing (ONH) listeners identified vowels in naturally produced /bVb/ syllables and in modified syllables that consisted of variable portions of the vowel edges (silent-center [SC] stimuli) or vowel center (center-only [CO] stimuli). Listeners achieved high levels of performance for all but the shortest stimuli, indicating that they were able to access vowel cues throughout the syllable. ONH listeners performed similarly to YNH listeners for most stimuli, but performed more poorly for the shortest CO stimuli. SC and CO stimuli were equally effective in supporting vowel identification except when acoustic information was limited to 20 ms.