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The effects of practicing speech accommodations to older adults

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Susan Kemper ,
Meghan Othick ,
Hope Gerhing ,
Julia Gubarchuk  and
Catherine Billington
Susan Kemper*
Affiliation:
University of Kansas
Meghan Othick
Affiliation:
University of Kansas
Hope Gerhing
Affiliation:
University of Kansas
Julia Gubarchuk
Affiliation:
University of Kansas
Catherine Billington
Affiliation:
University of Kansas
*
426 Fraser, Psychology, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045
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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 selfratings of communicative competence.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , April 1998 , pp. 175 - 192
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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