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