Centre for Policy on Ageing



The effects of talker familiarity on spoken word identification in younger and older listeners
Author(s)	Cynthia A Yonan, Mitchell S Sommers
Journal title	Psychology and Aging, vol 15, no 1, March 2000
Pages	pp 88-99
Keywords	Cognitive processes ; Age groups [elderly] ; Young adults [20-25] ; United States of America.
Annotation	The present study was designed to examine age differences in the ability to use voice information acquired intentionally (Experiment 1) or incidentally (Experiment 2) as an aid to spoken word identification. Following both implicit and explicit voice learning, participants were asked to identify novel words spoken either by familiar talkers (ones they had been exposed to in the training phase) or by four unfamiliar voices. In both experiments, explicit memory for talkers' voices was significantly lower in older than young listeners. Despite this age-related decline in voice recognition, however, older adults exhibited equivalent, and in some cases greater, benefit than young listeners from having words spoken by familiar talkers. Implications of the findings for age-related changes in explicit versus implicit memory systems are discussed. (RH).
Accession Number	CPA-000613409 A
Classmark	DA: BB: SD6: 7T
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...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing.