Elderspeak: Speech accommodations to older adults

Abstract

Ten service providers and 10 caregivers were recorded as they spoke to groups of younger or older adults. Ten-minute speech samples were analyzed for the occurrence of "elderspeak." systematic speech accommodations directed towards older adults, using measures of syntactic complexity, verbal fluency, propositional content, lexical choice, discourse organization, speech rate, and other stylistic markers. Both the caregivers and service providers adjusted how they spoke to different audiences: They reduced the length and complexity of their utterances, produced more lexical fillers and sentence fragments, used fewer long words of three or more syllables, more utterances per turn and per topic, and more repetitions when addressing older adults. They also spoke more slowly and paused longer when addressing older audiences. Propositional content, type-token ratios, diminutives and tag questions, however, did not vary with audience. These findings confirm prior subjective accounts of the use of an "elderspeak" register.Ryan, Giles, Bartolucci, and Henwood (1 986) proposed the term "communication predicament of aging" to refer to the impact of negative expectations, held by others and, perhaps, echoed by older adults themselves, about the communicative competence of older adults. This predicament leads to ... a vicious cycle in which the changes of aging (e.g., physical appearance, voice quality, hearing difficulties, slowness of movement, loss of role) elicit [exdogenous] interpretations from others of diminished competence; and these inferences then lead to constraining conditions in which the older person has less opportunity to communicate effectively .

Elderspeak Communication: Impact on Dementia Care

“…Very short sentence length, is used as a strategy to simplify speech and simplified vocabulary and grammar are also common modifications in elderspeak communication. 3,20 Ryan and colleagues 21 describe how elderspeak derives from stereotypical views of older adults as less competent than younger adults and how elderspeak projects these stereotypes on elders. When younger adults talk with elders, they simplify speech and alter the emotional tone (underlying affective quality of messages).…”

Defusing practices as mitigation in speech and language intervention

“…This use of the pronoun is inclusive, and signals that the task is a mutual endeavour of the SLP and the child, which removes some of the responsibility for success from the child and defuses face-threat. A similar use of 'we' has been described as a diminishing and mitigating practice in child-directed speech (Greiser and Kuhl 1988;Foster 1990) and in elderspeak (Caporael 1981;Kemper 1994). This mitigating use of 'we' instead of 'you' is quite different from the use of 'we' instead of 'I', described in research on talk in the workplace, where the 'we' serves an act of the professional not taking the full responsibility for his/her utterance.…”

A Theory of Relational Ageism: A Discourse Analysis of the 2015 White House Conference on Aging

“…This justification, encoding, enactment, and routinization of discrimination can have a significant impact on our attitudes, beliefs and values, and our behaviors. For example, the use of "elderspeak" or language that infantilizes older adults is a behavioral consequence of the encoding and enactment of discriminatory language (Kemper, 1994).…”