Contributions of Language-Specific and Domain-General Cognitive Abilities to the Comprehension of Focus Prosody in Jianghuai Mandarin: Effects of Age.

A growing body of research has explored the cognitive factors influencing aging adults' recognition of spoken words and phrases. In contrast, research on the cognitive contributions to speech prosody comprehension in tonal languages across adulthood remains relatively limited. This study aimed to bridge this gap by investigating the contributions of language-specific and domain-general cognitive factors to focus prosody comprehension performance among aging speakers of Jianghuai Mandarin. Young, middle-aged, and older healthy native speakers of Jianghuai Mandarin (N = 30 per group) performed a focus comprehension task, where they inferred the underlying intentions conveyed by different conditions (initial focus, medial focus, and final focus) of focus prosody. They also completed a series of language-specific (acoustic representation, meaning categorization, and focus knowledge) and domain-general (inhibitory control, attention switching, and working memory) cognitive assessments pertinent to understanding focus prosody. Findings showed an age-related decline in the comprehension of focus prosody, along with different rates of reduction in language-specific and domain-general cognitive abilities. These cognitive abilities did not modulate the focus comprehension performance among the young and middle-aged groups. In the older group, however, positive associations were observed between focus comprehension performance and certain domain-general abilities, as evidenced by the strong predictive power of attention switching and working memory. The findings provide insights into the mechanisms underpinning linguistic prosody processing among aging adults.