No abstract

This study examined the use of elderspeak, a speech register targeted at older listeners, during a referential communication task. The task required the listener to reproduce a route drawn on a map following the speaker's instructions. Young adults were paired with older adults who performed naturally or who followed a script simulating dementia to determine if the young adults would modify their fluency, prosody, grammatical complexity, semantic content, or discourse style. When paired with older adults simulating dementia, the young adults' instructions were longer, more informative, and more repetitious; however, the young adults did not alter their prosody or grammatical complexity. Together with previous findings on practice effects on elderspeak, these findings suggest that young adults adjust their speech to the perceived communicative needs of older listeners by varying information content but not by varying information delivery.Elderspeak is addressed to healthy older adults as well as to those who are or are presumed to have dementia (Caporael,