Cross-modality matching of linguistic prosody in older and younger adults

Older adults perform worse than younger adults in recognising auditory linguistic prosody. Such problems may result from deterioration at the sensory level (e.g., hearing loss). The current study used a novel approach to examine this, by determining older adult’s performance on a visual prosody task. If older adults are able to process visual prosody this suggests that any difficulty they show when processing auditory linguistic expressions could be related to hearing loss. The current study presented 18 younger and 11 older adults with pairs of sentences spoken by the same talker. They decided whether the pair contained the same or different prosody in a simple AX matching task. Sentence pairs were presented in four different ways; auditory-auditory (AA), visual-visual (VV), audio-visual (AV), and visual-audio (VA). Compared to older adults, younger adults exhibited similar performance for focused statements but showed better performance for questions. We suggest that problems processing questioning expressions might result from hearing loss, problems perceiving pitch, or problems at the cognitive level

Emotion in faces and voices : recognition and production by young and older adults

Older adults are less accurate than younger adults at emotion recognition. Given that deficits in emotion recognition have been associated with interpersonal conflict and, in turn, a reduced quality of life, understanding how older adults process emotion is vital. Thus, the research strategy of the current thesis was to investigate specific questions concerning how older adults process emotion information, e.g., how well older adults process a variety of emotional expression types and whether having multiple sources of expressive information will improve emotion recognition; how older adults extract information from emotional expressions; where problems might occur during the emotion recognition process; and whether poor emotion recognition is related to poor emotion production. My approach was different to the majority of other studies in that I tested multi-modal, dynamic spoken expressions in addition to the unimodal and static emotional expressions that are typically used for assessing emotion recognition. The first experiment assessed emotion recognition for auditory-visual (AV), visual-only (VO), and auditory-only (AO) speech stimuli (Chapter 2). The second series of experiments focused on VO expressions of emotion and investigated how older adults extract information from such expressions. The final two experiments investigated potential problems that older adults may encounter during the emotion recognition process. Taken together, the experiments in this thesis provide insight into the differences in the way older and younger adults process emotional expressions. Such insights can be used to develop reliable and ecologically valid tools to assess the emotion recognition ability of older adults