Aging Effect On Cue Weight In Mandarin Tone Perception In Noise

The present study aims to explore the effect of aging on cue weight in Mandarin Tone 2 and Tone 3 Perception in different kinds of listening conditions.Fifteen young listeners and thirty old listeners participated in the study.The participants were asked to complete dichotic listening test and tones 2 and 3 identification test.The results showed that there were differences in the use of tone perception cues between old listeners and young listeners.Young listeners relied on pitch and duration in perceiving Tone 2 and Tone 3,while old listeners mainly used duration to perceive Tone 2 and Tone 3 and pitch is of little use for old listeners to perceive Tone 2 and Tone 3.Another main finding of the present study was that young and old listeners performed differentially in different noise types and signal-to-noise ratios(SNR).Cue weight in tone perception was not related to hearing threshold.Instead,selective attention possibly accounted for the difference in cue weight in tone perception between old and young listeners.The study may offer insights into the elderly's speech perceptual strategies,thus facilitating the clinical diagnosis and intervention of speech perception difficulty and the research and development of hearing aids targeted at the elderly.In addition,the study will provide experimental evidence of the processing pattern of Mandarin tone perception.