Adaptation to distorted speech in young and older adults

One of the hallmarks of human speech perception is our ability to understand words produced by different speakers, even though the acoustic representation of any given word differs from person to person. We are also able to adjust to speakers who have a different speech rate, intonation, or accent from that to which we are accustomed.The mechanisms through which listeners can rapidly adapt to novel speech stimuli are not well understood. In this talk I will present a series of behavioral and preliminary fMRI studies investigating how listeners process sentences that have been acoustically distorted. Studies with healthy older adults suggest that this form of perceptual learning remains relatively intact into older adulthood.