The effects of age and level of education on the ability of adult native speakers of Dutch to segment speech into words

This study tested Hulstijn's (2011) hypothesis that adult native speakers share the ability to process every-day speech, although older people do so more slowly than younger people. In two segmentation tasks, segments of speech were presented consisting of two to four highly common words. In the Count Task, participants decided as quickly as possible how many words they had heard. In the Dictation Task, participants wrote down what they had heard. Participants (N = 235) were selected on the basis of their age (young vs senior) and level ofeducation (low vs high). Some of the findings are at variance with the predictions, which may or may not have been caused by a task confound.