Facilitating older adults' performance on a referential communication task through speech accommodations

Abstract

This study used a referential communication task to investigate the effectiveness of elderspeak, a speech register targeted at older listeners. The tasks required the listener to reproduce a route drawn on a city map or dot pattern following the speaker's instructions. In the current variant of the task, listeners were prohibited from interrupting or questioning the speakers. Dyads of young-young, older-older, and young-older adults were compared with regard to measures of fluency, prosody, grammatical complexity, semantic content, and speaker style. The older speakers showed little variation in response to listener age or task

Using elderspeak with older adults

“…The scripts were derived from past studies (Kemper et al, 1996;Kemper et al, 1995) but modified so as to increase the number of hesitations, errors, vague or ambiguous references, and misdirections and to decrease the number of informative instructions, clarifications, and expansions. The scripts were intended to be similar to the spontaneous speech of older adults with regard to all other measures of fluency and grammatical complexity.…”

“…The use of elderspeak appeared to trigger older adults' perceptions of themselves as communicatively impaired and led to increased self-report of expressive and receptive problems by the older adults (Kemper et al, in press;Kemper et al, 1996;Kemper et al, 1995). The streamlined version of elderspeak that resulted from extended practice had an even more deleterious effect on the older adults' self-assessment of their communicative competence (Kemper et al, in press) than the spontaneous, unpracticed form.…”

“…In the Kemper et al (1995) study, the older listeners frequently interrupted speakers to repeat the speakers' instructions, request clarification, or express confusion or difficulty with the task. When the listeners were prohibited from interrupting the speaker to request clarification or express confusion, Kemper, Othick, Warren, Gubarchuk, and Gerhing (1996) observed that young adults will still spontaneously adopt an elderspeak style when addressing older listeners. This speech register was marked by reductions in speaking rate, sentence length, the use of complex syntactic constructions, and propositional density, and increases in words, utterances, instructions, and repetitions.…”

Young and older adults’ views of telephone talk: Conversation problems and social uses

“…These negative expectations held by the young, coupled with the lower self-reports of telephone problems by the older group, may lead to conversations where the older adult may perceive the younger person's verbal behavior as unwarranted and patronizing . The adapted Language in Adulthood Questionnaire could be used after an intergenerational telephone conversation to assess the predicted negative impact of feeling patronized on self perceptions of communication competence, as shown in the face-to-face situations of Kemper and her colleagues (Kemper, Vandeputte, Rice, Cheung, & Gubarchuk, 1995;Kemper, Othick, Warren, Gubarchuk, & Gerhing, 1996). Earlier we pointed out that the telephone's reliance on the aural channel may facilitate older conversants' comprehension.…”

Academic Press is an imprint of Elsevier

“…Performance in a referential communication task is better when older adults receive instruction from young speakers (e.g., Kemper et al, 1995Kemper et al, , 1996, but at a cost -older adults also report more expressive and receptive communication problems when interacting with young speakers. This conjunction of improved performance, together with negative self-evaluation, has led to a search for versions of elderspeak that impart performance benefits without being patronizing or insulting Williams, Kemper, & Hummert, 2003).…”