Perception of linguistic and affective prosody in younger and older adults

Previous research has suggested that older adults display deficits in affective-prosodic processing, while grammatical-prosodic processing remains intact. In the present study, groups of younger and older adults took part in a series of experiments assessing their comprehension of prosodic information at the affective, grammatical and perceptual levels. It was found that older and younger adults performed similarly on perceptual tasks. However, deficits were seen in older adults across a number of tasks: affective-prosodic processing, the use of temporal information to parse syntactic structure, and the use of lexical stress to distinguish adjective-noun pairs from compound nouns. These findings suggest a generalized prosodic deficit in older adults which cannot be ascribed to a primary auditory deficit