Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Word-Finding Difficulties: Exploring Tip-Of-The-Tongue States In Young And Old Adults, Allison J. Partridge

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

A Tip-of-the-Tongue (TOT) occurs when you are trying to think of a specific word but lack the ability to bring it to mind. The present study examined implicit learning processes operating under errorful (20-second delay) or errorless (0-second delay) learning conditions in TOT states. Participants included 15 young (20-30 years) and 15 old (65-88 years) adults who were tested twice a week for four weeks on a definition-word pair task. For young participants, results indicated that a TOT was more likely and older participants were more likely to indicate they did not know the word on a consecutive session after …

Effects Of Aging And Spectral Shaping On The Sub-Cortical (Brainstem) Differentiation Of Contrastive Stop Consonants, Dania A. Rishiq

Theses and Dissertations (ETD)

Purpose: The objectives of this dissertation are to: (1) evaluate the influence of aging on the sub-cortical (brainstem) differentiation of voiced stop consonants (i.e. /b-d-g/); (2) determine whether potential aging deficits at the brainstem level influence behavioral identification of the /b-d-g/ stimuli, (3) investigate whether spectral shaping diminishes any aging impairments at the brainstem level; and (4) if so, whether minimizing these deficits improves the behavioral identification of the speech stimuli.

Subjects: Behavioral and electrophysiological responses were collected from 11 older adults (> 50 years old) with near-normal to normal hearing and were compared to those of 16 normal-hearing younger …

Age-Related Changes To The Production Of Linguistic Prosody, Daniel Richard Barnes

Open Access Theses

The production of speech prosody (the rhythm, pausing, and intonation associated with natural speech) is critical to effective communication. The current study investigated the impact of age-related changes to physiology and cognition in relation to the production of two types of linguistic prosody: lexical stress and the disambiguation of syntactically ambiguous utterances. Analyses of the acoustic correlates of stress: speech intensity (or sound-pressure level; SPL), fundamental frequency (F0), key word/phrase duration, and pause duration revealed that both young and older adults effectively use these acoustic features to signal linguistic prosody, although the relative weighting of cues differed by group. Differences …