ABSTRACT

Older adults are able to implicitly pick up structural regularities in the environment despite declining cognitive abilities. Here, we investigated elderly’s abilities to implicitly pick up novel linguistic constraints in speech production. Across four training days, young and healthy older Dutch-speaking adults were asked to rapidly recite Dutch phonotactic syllables. Two unrestricted consonants were experimentally constrained to onset or coda positions depending on the medial vowel. Analysis of speech errors revealed rapid adherence to the novel second-order constraints in both the younger and the older group. However, in the older group, there was weaker trial-specific learning compared to the younger group, potentially due to explicit memory deficits. Strikingly, the error pattern of the elderly mirrors earlier developmental work with children using the same paradigm. The findings are discussed in light of possible age-dependent differences in implicit and explicit cognitive subsystems underlying human skill learning.

摘要

尽管认知能力下降，老年人仍能够隐性地了解环境中的结构规律。在这里，我们调查了老年人在语音生成中隐含地获取新的语言约束的能力。在为期四天的训练中，年轻、健康的年长荷兰语成年人被要求快速背诵荷兰语音节。根据内侧元音，两个不受限制的辅音在实验上被限制在开始或结尾位置。对语音错误的分析表明，年轻人和老年人都快速遵守了新的二阶约束。然而，在老年组中，与年轻组相比，试验特定的学习能力较弱，这可能是由于外显记忆缺陷所致。引人注目的是，老年人的错误模式反映了使用相同范式的儿童早期发展工作。根据人类技能学习基础的内隐和外显认知子系统中可能存在的年龄相关差异来讨论这些发现。