The Attentional Control of Younger and Older Adults in Forced-Attention Dichotic Listening of Cantonese Tones.

Purpose: The forced-attention dichotic listening (FADL) task is used to examine how people control attention during speech processing. Younger adults can flexibly shift attention to instructed ears from the baseline right-ear advantage (REA) for consonants (cued by temporal information). However, it...

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Publicado en:Journal of Speech, Language & Hearing Research Vol. 69; no. 6; pp. 2830 - 2849
Autores principales: Wang, Yuqi, Yang, Xiaohu, Qin, Quentin Zhen
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association Jun2026
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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      dt: Jun2026
      vid: 69
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      pub: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association
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        10.1044/2026_JSLHR-25-00915
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        atl: The Attentional Control of Younger and Older Adults in Forced-Attention Dichotic Listening of Cantonese Tones.
      aug:
        au:
          Wang, Yuqi
          Yang, Xiaohu
          Qin, Quentin Zhen
        affil:
          Speech, Learning, and the Brain (SLaB) Lab, Division of Humanities, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Kowloon, China
          School of Foreign Studies, Tongji University, Shanghai, China
          Center for Aging Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Kowloon, China
      su:
        Hong Kong (China)
        Task performance
        Attention
        Analysis of variance
        Aging
        Dichotic listening tests
        Research funding
        Logistic regression analysis
        Musical perception
        Descriptive statistics
        Experimental design
        Research
        Auditory perception
        Speech perception
        Data analysis software
        Cerebral dominance
        Musical pitch
      sug:
        subj:
          Task performance
          Attention
          Analysis of variance
          Aging
          Hong Kong (China)
          Dichotic listening tests
          Research funding
          Logistic regression analysis
          Musical perception
          Descriptive statistics
          Experimental design
          Research
          Auditory perception
          Speech perception
          Data analysis software
          Cerebral dominance
          Musical pitch
      ab: Purpose: The forced-attention dichotic listening (FADL) task is used to examine how people control attention during speech processing. Younger adults can flexibly shift attention to instructed ears from the baseline right-ear advantage (REA) for consonants (cued by temporal information). However, it remains underexplored whether tonal language speakers can control their attention to tones, which are cued by spectral information and typically trigger a left-ear advantage (LEA) at baseline. Moreover, older adults sometimes fail to show these patterns, as compared to younger adults, possibly due to age-related decline. This study investigated whether these attentional controls generalize to Cantonese tones and whether younger and older Cantonese speakers show different attentional control in an FADL task of Cantonese tones. Method: Sixty native Cantonese-speaking younger adults, aged 18-25 years (Experiment 1), and 64 older adults, aged 59-72 years (Experiment 2), completed tone training followed by an FADL test. In three conditions (i.e., nonforced, forced-left [FL], and forced-right [FR]), they identified dichotically presented Cantonese tones according to attentional instructions. Results: Both the younger and older adults successfully modulated attention. The participants, regardless of age, enhanced the LEA in the FL condition and reversed it to an REA in the FR condition. An exploratory group comparison showed that younger adults might exhibit a significantly larger shift of ear preference in the FL condition than older adults. Conclusions: The findings provide evidence that auditory attentional control is a highly flexible and cue-general cognitive function, which can be generalized to Cantonese tones. Crucially, the core performance of attentional control in Cantonese processing remains largely preserved with aging. It suggests that age-related decline is not the only consequence of aging, but compensatory strategies are adopted by older adults to cope with possible decline and keep their behavioral performance intact.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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