Verbal Ability, Argument Order, and Attitude Formation.

The current study explored the interaction of verbal ability and presentation order on readers' attitude formation when presented with two-sided arguments. Participants read arguments for and against compulsory voting and genetic engineering, and attitudes were assessed before and after reading the passages. Participants' verbal ability was measured, combining vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension skill.

Does increasing the intelligibility of a competing sound source interfere more with speech comprehension in older adults than it does in younger adults?

A previous study (Schneider, Daneman, Murphy, & Kwong See, 2000) found that older listeners' decreased ability to recognize individual words in a noisy auditory background was responsible for most, if not all, of the comprehension difficulties older adults experience when listening to a lecture in a background of unintelligible babble. The present study investigated whether the use of a more intelligible distracter (a competing lecture) might reveal an increased susceptibility to distraction in older adults. The results from Experiments 1 and 2 showed that both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired older adults performed poorer than younger adults when everyone was tested in identical listening situations.

How Spoken Language Comprehension is Achieved by Older Listeners in Difficult Listening Situations.

Background/study Context: Comprehending spoken discourse in noisy situations is likely to be more challenging to older adults than to younger adults due to potential declines in the auditory, cognitive, or linguistic processes supporting speech comprehension. These challenges might force older listeners to reorganize the ways in which they perceive and process speech, thereby altering the balance between the contributions of bottom-up versus top-down processes to speech comprehension.

Methods: The authors review studies that investigated the effect of age on listeners' ability to follow and comprehend lectures (monologues), and two-talker conversations (dialogues), and the extent to which individual differences in lexical knowledge and reading comprehension skill relate to individual differences in speech comprehension.

How Age, Linguistic Status, and the Nature of the Auditory Scene Alter the Manner in Which Listening Comprehension Is Achieved in Multitalker Conversations.

Purpose: We investigated how age and linguistic status affected listeners' ability to follow and comprehend 3-talker conversations, and the extent to which individual differences in language proficiency predict speech comprehension under difficult listening conditions.

Method: Younger and older L1s as well as young L2s listened to 3-talker conversations, with or without spatial separation between talkers, in either quiet or against moderate or high 12-talker babble background, and were asked to answer questions regarding their contents.

Results: After compensating for individual differences in speech recognition, no significant differences in conversation comprehension were found among the groups.

Privileged versus shared knowledge about object identity in real-time referential processing.

A central claim in research on interactive conversation is that listeners use the knowledge assumed to be shared with a conversational partner to guide their understanding of utterances from the earliest moments of processing. In the present study we investigated whether this claim extends to cases where shared vs. private knowledge is discrepant in terms of the identity assigned to a mutually seen object that could be misidentified on the basis of its appearance.

How age and linguistic competence alter the interplay of perceptual and cognitive factors when listening to conversations in a noisy environment.

Multi-talker conversations challenge the perceptual and cognitive capabilities of older adults and those listening in their second language (L2). In older adults these difficulties could reflect declines in the auditory, cognitive, or linguistic processes supporting speech comprehension. The tendency of L2 listeners to invoke some of the semantic and syntactic processes from their first language (L1) may interfere with speech comprehension in L2.

Are there age-related differences in social suggestibility to central and peripheral misinformation?

Unlabelled: BACKGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT: Dalton and Daneman ( 2006 , Memory, 14, 486-501) showed that young adults can be induced to accept misinformation from a co-witness, even if it contradicts central features of a previously witnessed event. This study investigated whether older adults are also susceptible to social suggestion, and if so, whether to the same or different degree as their younger counterparts. The study also investigated whether participants were more likely to succumb to suggestions delivered by a peer or an older figure.

Cross-language differences in informational masking of speech by speech: English versus Mandarin Chinese.

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to determine why perceived spatial separation provides a greater release from informational masking in Chinese than English when target sentences in each of the languages are masked by other talkers speaking the same language.

Method: Monolingual speakers of English and Mandarin Chinese listened to semantically anomalous sentences in their own language when 1 of 3 maskers was present (speech-spectrum noise, a 2-talker speech masker in the same language, and a 2-talker speech masker in the other language).

Results: Both groups benefitted equally from spatial separation when the maskers were speech-spectrum noise or cross-language.

How readers spontaneously interpret man-suffix words: evidence from eye movements.

This study investigated whether readers are more likely to assign a male referent to man-suffix terms (e.g. chairman) than to gender-neutral alternatives (e.

Effects of aging and noise on real-time spoken word recognition: evidence from eye movements.

Purpose: To use eye tracking to investigate age differences in real-time lexical processing in quiet and in noise in light of the fact that older adults find it more difficult than younger adults to understand conversations in noisy situations.

Method: Twenty-four younger and 24 older adults followed spoken instructions referring to depicted objects, for example, "Look at the candle." Eye movements captured listeners' ability to differentiate the target noun (candle) from a similar-sounding phonological competitor (e.

Age-related changes in reading comprehension: an individual-differences perspective.

In this study, the authors show that Hannon and Daneman's (2001, Journal of Educational Psychology, 93, 103-128) component processes task can be used to investigate individual differences in older readers' comprehension performance, and to determine which components of comprehension are most susceptible to declines with normal aging. Results revealed that the ability to remember new text information, to make inferences about new text information, to access prior knowledge in long-term memory, and to integrate prior knowledge with new text information all accounted for a substantial proportion of variance in older adults' reading comprehension performance. Although there were age-related declines in all of these component processes, the components associated with new learning were more susceptible to age-related declines than were the components associated with accessing what already is known.

Using puns to study contextual influences on lexical ambiguity resolution: evidence from eye movements.

Participants' eye movements were monitored while they read sentences containing biased homographs in either a single-meaning context condition that instantiated the subordinate meaning of the homograph without ruling out the dominant meaning (e.g., "The man with a toothache had a crown made by the best dentist in town") or a dual-meaning pun context condition that supported both the subordinate and dominant meanings (e.

Comprehension of speeded discourse by younger and older listeners.

Researchers have argued that older adults are more adversely affected by speeding speech than are younger adults. However, the age effects usually occur when (1) the speech materials are artificially speeded to rates well above those that occur in natural speech; (2) the speeding method introduces distortions that tax the older adult's auditory processes; and (3) the speech materials are simple sentences or very short passages. This study evaluated whether older adults are disadvantaged when listening to extended discourse (10- to 15-min lectures) speeded to a rate near to the limit of normally encountered fast speech (240 words/min) with a minimum of acoustic distortion.

How competing speech interferes with speech comprehension in everyday listening situations.

Listeners often complain that they have trouble following a conversation when the environment is noisy. The environment could be noisy because of the presence of other unrelated but meaningful conversations, or because of the presence of less meaningful sound sources such as ventilation noise. Both kinds of distracting sound sources produce interference at the auditory periphery (activate similar regions along the basilar membrane), and this kind of interference is called "energetic masking".

Prospective memory: the relative effects of encoding, retrieval, and the match between encoding and retrieval.

Previous prospective memory studies have revealed some important features of encoding, retrieval, and the match between the encoding and the retrieval that contribute to prospective memory performance. However, these studies have not provided evidence concerning the relative importance of these three factors because no study has investigated all three in a single design. We developed a laboratory-based paradigm that allowed us to manipulate different characteristics of encoding, retrieval, and the match between encoding and retrieval simultaneously in a single experiment.

Social suggestibility to central and peripheral misinformation.

This study used a laboratory-based paradigm to investigate social influences on participants' susceptibility to misleading suggestions. Participants viewed a video clip of an action sequence with one or more peers, and then were required to discuss the event with the co-witness or with the group of co-witnesses. During the discussion a confederate, posing as a peer, presented misinformation about central and peripheral features of the co-witnessed event.

Why do older adults have difficulty following conversations?

Age-related declines in understanding conversation may be largely a consequence of perceptual rather than cognitive declines. B. A.

Speech comprehension difficulties in older adults: cognitive slowing or age-related changes in hearing?

Speech comprehension declines more rapidly in older adults than in younger adults as speech rate increases. This effect is usually attributed to a slowing of brain function with age. Alternatively, this Age X Speed interaction could reflect the inability of the older adult's auditory system to cope with speed-induced stimulus degradation.

Does the information content of an irrelevant source differentially affect spoken word recognition in younger and older adults?

To determine whether older adults find it difficult to inhibit the processing of irrelevant speech, the authors asked younger and older adults to listen to and repeat meaningless sentences (e.g., "A rose could paint a fish") when the perceived location of the masker (speech or noise) but not the target was manipulated.

Listening in aging adults: from discourse comprehension to psychoacoustics.

Older adults, whether or not they have clinically significant hearing loss, have more trouble than their younger counterparts understanding speech in everyday life. These age-related difficulties in speech understanding may be attributed to changes in higher-level cognitive processes such as language comprehension, memory, attention, and cognitive slowing, or to lower-level sensory and perceptual processes. A complicating factor in determining how these sources might contribute to age-related declines in speech understanding is that they are highly correlated.

Using working memory theory to investigate the construct validity of multiple-choice reading comprehension tests such as the SAT.

When taking multiple-choice tests of reading comprehension such as the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT), test takers use a range of strategies that vary in the extent to which they emphasize reading the questions versus reading the passages. Researchers have challenged the construct validity of these tests because test takers can achieve better-than-chance performance even if they do not read the passages at all. By using an individual-differences approach that compares the relative power of working memory span to predict SAT performance for different test-taking strategies, the authors show that the SAT appears to be tapping reading comprehension processes as long as test takers engage in at least some reading of the passages themselves.