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Open Imaging Index
MRI Brain

Spoken word perception in aging fMRI (ds002382)

The neural basis of spoken word perception in older adults

Structural and sparse-sampling task fMRI of healthy young and older adults who listened to or repeated spoken words, collected to compare auditory cortex activity across age. 61 adults from St. Louis, USA, in BIDS under CC0.

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Overview

Peelle and colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis scanned healthy young and older adults while they heard single spoken words, to test whether aging changes how the brain recognises words heard in quiet. Each person did two tasks in the scanner: attentive listening without a response, and repeating each word aloud. The images, together with age, sex, handedness and some hearing thresholds, are on OpenNeuro as ds002382 under a CC0 waiver.

Composition

Snapshot 1.0.1 (April 2022) holds 61 right-handed native English speakers: 29 young adults aged 19 to 30 and 32 older adults aged 65 to 81. The participants table lists 36 women, 24 men and one person coded as another sex. Every participant has one T1-weighted and one T2-weighted anatomical scan and four BOLD runs, two per task. Pure-tone audiometric thresholds for both ears at 250 Hz to 8 kHz are filled in for 17 people, eight young and nine older.

Acquisition

All data come from a 3T Siemens Prisma with a 32-channel head coil. The T1-weighted MPRAGE has 0.8 mm isotropic voxels. The functional runs use a multiband factor of 8 and 2 mm isotropic voxels in a sparse design: each volume takes about 0.77 s within a 3.07 s repetition time, leaving a quiet gap for the word and the spoken reply. Stimuli were 240 monosyllabic words plus single-channel noise-vocoded words as an unintelligible baseline. Stimuli, scripts and extracted data are on OSF, and group result maps on NeuroVault.

Annotations

There are no image annotations. Event files mark word, noise and silent trials with word frequency and neighbourhood density, and in the repetition runs they flag whether each reply was correct, as scored offline.

Known limitations

  • The sample is small and has no middle-aged adults, so age can only be treated as two groups.
  • Hearing was measured in a minority of participants, which limits analyses of hearing loss.
  • Older adults moved more during the repetition task, and the paper excluded many high-motion frames.
  • Health and hearing status were self-reported.

Cohort

Aggregate numbers from the sources below. Bars are relative to the 61 subjects.

Sex

  • Female 36 59%
  • Male 24 39%
  • Other 1 2%

Participants in Rogers et al. 2020, Age-related differences in auditory cortex activity during spoken word recognition, Neurobiology of Language; sex in participants.tsv of ds002382 (CC0), counted per row from the age and sex columns

Contrast / sequence

Groups can overlap

  • T1-weighted 61 100%
  • T2-weighted 61 100%
  • BOLD fMRI 61 100%

anat, func in File listing of ds002382 snapshot 1.0.1 (CC0), counted per anat and func NIfTI file

Scanner vendor

  • Siemens Healthineers 61 100%

MRI Data Acquisition and Processing in Rogers et al. 2020, Age-related differences in auditory cortex activity during spoken word recognition, Neurobiology of Language

Country

  • United States 61 100%

Participants in Rogers et al. 2020, Age-related differences in auditory cortex activity during spoken word recognition, Neurobiology of Language

Age

mean 48.4 ± 24, median 65, range 19 to 81

0
10
20
27
10-1920-2930-3960-6970-7980-89

age in participants.tsv of ds002382 (CC0), counted per row from the age and sex columns

Condition

Groups can overlap

  • Healthy control 61 100%

Participants in Rogers et al. 2020, Age-related differences in auditory cortex activity during spoken word recognition, Neurobiology of Language

Field strength

  • 3 T 61 100%

MRI Data Acquisition and Processing in Rogers et al. 2020, Age-related differences in auditory cortex activity during spoken word recognition, Neurobiology of Language

Age by sex

Reported cross table. Missing cells were not published (fewer than 10 or not reported).

Female Male
  • 10
    60-69
    n/a
  • 18
    20-29
    n/a

age and sex in participants.tsv of ds002382 (CC0), counted per row from the age and sex columns

Contrast combinations

How many subjects have exactly each set of contrasts.

T1wT2wboldSubjects with exactly this set
61

anat and func in File listing of ds002382 snapshot 1.0.1 (CC0), counted per anat and func NIfTI file

License and access

Our reading of the license, not legal advice. Before you use the data, read the original license and confirm that your use is allowed. We take no responsibility for how you use a dataset. Full disclaimer

Access
Open download

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Access page

Creative Commons Zero 1.0 Universal

Public domain dedication. Do anything with the data, including commercial use, without asking and without having to give credit.

dataset_description.json of snapshot 1.0.1 states "License" CC0.

Original license text Version read: 1.0 Checked 2026-10-07

What you can do

  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes

What you can share

  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes

What you must do

  • No
  • Share alike No
  • No
  • No
  • Manuscript review No
  • Release code No
  • Return results No
  • Delete after use No

Limits

  • No
  • Location limits No

Citation

Rogers CS, Jones MS, McConkey S, Spehar B, Van Engen KJ, Sommers MS, Peelle JE. Age-related differences in auditory cortex activity during spoken word recognition. Neurobiology of Language 1, 452-473 (2020). doi:10.1162/nol_a_00021

Sources

Every number on this page comes from one of these documents. Each chart names the table or page it is taken from. The raw numbers are in stats.csv.