Perception of gated, highly familiar spoken monosyllabic nouns by children, teenagers, and older adults

A forward-gating procedure, employing highly familiar monosyllabic words, was used in testing 5–7-year-old children, 15–17-year-old teenagers, and 70–85-year-old adults. Teenagers identified the words at shorter gate durations than either the children or older adults, whose identification performances were nearly identical. Teenagers gave meaningful guesses at shorter durations than children, who, in turn, gave meaningful guesses at shorter durations than adults. The oldest listeners provided the largest number of phonetic guesses, whereas teenagers gave almost none. Individual differences in auditory pure-tone sensitivity did not account for the results. It is hypothesized that both word frequency effects and temporal processing differences were responsible for the findings.