The effects of practicing speech accommodations to older adults

Abstract

This study evaluated the effects of practice with a referential communication task on the form and effectiveness of elderspeak, a speech register targeted at older listeners. The task required the listener to reproduce a route drawn on a map following the speaker's instructions. Young adults were given extended practice with this task to determine if they would modify their fluency, prosody, grammatical complexity, semantic content, or discourse style. The effectiveness of the young speakers' instructions was also evaluated in terms of how accurately their older partners could reproduce the routes and in terms of the older adults' evaluations of their own communicative competence. With practice, the young adults' instructions became shorter, simpler, slower, and more repetitious; these selective changes did not affect the older adults' accuracy, but did result in lower self-ratings of communicative competence by the older partners. In a second study, a new group of young adults was given extended practice with young adults as partners. The practice effects were limited to fluency (sentence length and speech rate) and had no effect on the young partners' accuracy or selfratings of communicative competence.

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“…reported that speech addressed to older audiences (rather than younger ones) was characterized by fewer clauses per utterance, shorter utterances, fewer leftbranching or self-embedded clauses, more lexical fillers (e.g., you know), more sentence fragments, fewer cohesive ties, fewer words of three or more syllables, more repetitions, slower speech rate, and longer pauses. In addition, the use of diminutives was more frequent in addressing dementing than nondementing older adults in this study, but this may be context specific, inasmuch as young speakers in mixed-age dyads rarely use diminutives in referential communication tasks (Kemper et al, 1995(Kemper et al, , 1998c. Evaluations of elderspeak may be moderated by context (e.g.…”

“…Young speakers do not vary speech to older partners in a referential communication task very much regardless of whether the listeners are allowed to interrupt by asking questions or requesting clarification or to provide other feedback (Kemper et al, 1995. However, repeated practice on the same task (Kemper et al, 1998c), listener speech suggesting cognitive impairment (Kemper et al, 1998b), and simulation of speech to adults experiencing cognitive problems rather than living healthy, independent lives in the community (Kemper et al, 1998a) do lead to exaggerated forms of elderspeak in a referential communication task, suggestive of responsiveness to the communicative needs of partners in this task. Older adults also receive more patronizing messages in a simulated persuasion task, especially if targets are described negatively (Hummert et al, 1998).…”

Assessment meetings between care managers and persons living with dementia : Citizenship as practice

“…Kitwood (1997) argues that a person with dementia attracts more malignant social psychology than a person who has not been diagnosed with dementia. Previous research (Kemper et al, 1998) about elderspeak has not reached consensus on whether cognitively impaired older adults are addressed differently than other older adults. The use of interactional data, in this thesis, with two older persons where only one was diagnosed with dementia made it possible to show that the person with dementia was positioned differently than the other older adult in the same conversation.…”

“…Elderspeak has been argued to work as a self-fulfilling prophecy where the older person's communicative skills and competence are diminished if the younger conversational partner treats the older person as less competent (Savundranayagam, Ryan, Anas & Orange, 2007). Kemper, Othick, Gerhing, Gubarchuk and Billington (1998) showed that when younger caregivers spontaneously used elderspeak they enhanced the older adults' performance, but when communication became connected to a routine task, the use of patronizing talk became more distinctive, and the older adults perceived themselves as less competent (Kemper et al, 1998).…”

Ageism and Stigma

“…This type of speech is known as elder speak or secondary baby talk (Kemper, Otrhick, Gerhing, Gubarchuk, & Billington, 1998;Miller, 2009;Ruscher, 2001;Williams & Nussbaum, 2001). This speech pattern is common when a younger adult speaks to an older adult and is similar to when one speaks to an individual with disabilities (Giles & Gasiorek, 2011;Hummert & Ryan, 2001).…”