Reliance on visible speech cues during multimodal language processing: individual and age differences.
The current study demonstrates that when a strong inhibition process is invoked during multimodal (auditory-visual) language understanding: older adults perform worse than younger adults, visible speech does not benefit language-processing performance, and individual differences in measures of working memory for language do not predict performance. In contrast, in a task that does not invoke inhibition: adult age differences in performance are not obtained, visible speech benefits language performance, and individual differences in working memory predict performance. The results offer support for a framework for investigating multimodal language processing that incorporates assumptions about general information processing, individual differences in working memory capacity, and adult cognitive aging.
Thompson
L
L
Department of Psychology, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico 88003, USA. thompson@nmsu.edu
Garcia
E
E
Malloy
D
D
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology* / Q000523:psychology; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D004007:Dichotic Listening Tests / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D005868:Gestures; D006801:Humans; D007266:Inhibition, Psychological; D007802:Language; D008085:Lipreading; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D015588:Observer Variation; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*