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The effects of practicing speech accommodations to older adults
Kemper, Susan Othick, Meghan Gerhing, Hope Gubarchuk, Julia Billington, Catherine
Kemper, Susan
Othick, Meghan
Gerhing, Hope
Gubarchuk, Julia
Billington, Catherine
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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 self-ratings of communicative competence.
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Date
1998
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Cambridge University Press
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Kemper, S., Othick, M., Gerhing, H., Gubarchuk, J., & Billington, C. (1998). The effects of practicing speech accommodations to older adults. Applied Psycholinguistics, 19, 175-192. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S014271640001002X