| The presented studies attempt to further our understanding of spoken language comprehension as the interaction of the perceptual and cognitive systems. To do so, we used noise-vocoded speech (Shannon et al., 1995) in which the amplitude envelope of speech is preserved but the tine structure cues within specified frequency bands is oblierated. In study one, older adults were only able to identify as many vocoded words as younger if the words were presented with the ability to use envelope cues cumulatively. In study 2, we examine how comprehension benefits from two types of contextual support, predictability and repetition of sentence context, when identifying words in noise-vocoded sentences. Younger and older adults benefited from both types of supportive context independently and interactively, but older adults benefited even more than younger adults in all conditions. The findings suggest that younger and older adults differ in the processes used to comprehend spoken language. |
