title: Aging effect on Mandarin Chinese vowel and tone identification.
abstract: Mandarin Chinese speech sounds (vowels × tones) were presented to younger and older Chinese-native speakers with normal hearing. For the identification of vowel-plus-tone, vowel-only, and tone-only, younger listeners significantly outperformed older listeners. The tone 3 identification scores correlated significantly with the age of older listeners. Moreover, for older listeners, the identification rate of vowel-plus-tone was significantly lower than that of vowel-only and tone-only, whereas for younger listeners, there was no difference among the three identification scores. Therefore, aging negatively affected Mandarin vowel and tone perception, especially when listeners needed to process both phonemic and tonal information.
authors.affiliation: School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China sherwood@sjtu.edu.cn, yuxiawang@sjtu.edu.cn, babybabybear@sjtu.edu.cn, Helen.Tim.lovelife@sjtu.edu.cn, 8023xc@sjtu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Xiaohu
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.affiliation: School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China sherwood@sjtu.edu.cn, yuxiawang@sjtu.edu.cn, babybabybear@sjtu.edu.cn, Helen.Tim.lovelife@sjtu.edu.cn, 8023xc@sjtu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Yuxia
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China sherwood@sjtu.edu.cn, yuxiawang@sjtu.edu.cn, babybabybear@sjtu.edu.cn, Helen.Tim.lovelife@sjtu.edu.cn, 8023xc@sjtu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Lilong
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China sherwood@sjtu.edu.cn, yuxiawang@sjtu.edu.cn, babybabybear@sjtu.edu.cn, Helen.Tim.lovelife@sjtu.edu.cn, 8023xc@sjtu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Hui
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China sherwood@sjtu.edu.cn, yuxiawang@sjtu.edu.cn, babybabybear@sjtu.edu.cn, Helen.Tim.lovelife@sjtu.edu.cn, 8023xc@sjtu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Can
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA changliu@utexas.edu.
authors.forename: Chang
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Liu
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology* / Q000523:psychology; D044466:Asian People / Q000523:psychology; D001301:Audiometry, Pure-Tone; D034381:Hearing Loss / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D008875:Middle Aged; D010700:Phonetics; D010897:Pitch Discrimination / Q000502:physiology*; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult