Rapid adaptation to time-compressed speech in young and older adults

Background: The ability of human listeners to comprehend rapid speech improves quickly with experience, a process known as adaptation. Whether inefficient adaptation to rapid speech partially accounts for the marked difficulties of older listeners with rapid speech is not clear. Methods: Two conditions of adaptation to time-compressed speech were used. A baseline condition intended to test the hypothesis that adaptation is different in older and younger listeners, and an interference condition in which sentences compressed to two different rates were interleaved. Identification accuracy was compared between two time points (before and after adaptation) and between older and younger listeners. Results: The effects of adaptation did not differ between younger and older listeners in either adaptation condition. Conclusions: It seems that once initial performance differences are taken into account, rapid adaptation to time-compressed speech is as effective and as immune to interference by competing speech rates in younger and older adults.