Auditory habituation in young and older adults: The verbal transformation effect

In 3 experiments, auditory massed repetition was used to examine age-relate d differences in habituation by means of the verbal transformation paradigm . Participants heard 10 words (5 high frequency and 5 low frequency), each presented 180 times, and they reported perceived changes in the repeated wo rds (verbal transformations). In these experiments, alder adults reported f ewer illusory percepts than young adults. Older adults' loss of auditory ac uity and slowing of processing, stimulus degradation (in young adults), and instructions biasing the report of these illusory percepts did not account for the fewer illusory percepts reported by the older adults. These findin gs suggest that older adults' reduced susceptibility to habituation arises from centrally located declines in the transmission of information within t he word-recognition pathway. The discussion focuses on the implications tha t these age-related declines may have on word identification during on-line speech perception.