The referential communication task was used to see if high off-target verbosity (OTV), defined as excessive speech that is lacking in focus, negatively affects communication of nonautobiographical information. The task required 1 individual (the director) to communicate descriptions of abstract figures to another (the matcher). Out of 455 adults aged 63 to 93 who were screened for OTV, 27 directors were drawn from each of the top and bottom 15% of the range of OTV scores and 26 directors and all 80 matchers from the middle 50%. High OTV directors were less efficient communicators about the figures and showed poorer inhibitory control but did not intrude personal information in their speech. The implications of the findings for the inhibitory deficit and pragmatic change explanations of OTV are discussed.

This study investigated social behavior in older adults with varying levels of off-target verbosity (OTV). After screening 455 adults in Phase 1, 198 individuals were selected to participate in both a get-acquainted conversation and an experimental cues situation and to complete social and cognitive measures. Higher OTV participants had lower cognitive inhibitory scores, talked more, were less interested in their partners, and focused more on themselves. Their conversational partners were less satisfied. Age and cognitive functioning were not related to OTV scores or conversational style for low- and mid-range participants. Although high-OTV individuals talked less when exposed to social cues signalling boredom, they spoke more relative to other participants. Self-reported social behavior had little relation with OTV and conversational style, but higher OTV individuals were less accurate in judging videotaped social interactions. Gender differences in conversational behavior are also discussed.

The present paper introduces a way to document quantitatively the changing relation between shared knowledge and communication over time. It is often assumed that people engaged in prolonged interaction come to share more knowledge over the course of interaction, and, further, it is assumed that this increase in shared knowledge enables them to communicate more efficiently with each other. In Experiments 1 and 2, this assumption was evaluated by monitoring the participants' knowledge of the experimental stimuli and their estimates about each other's knowledge periodically during several trials of a referential communication task. The results confirmed that participants developed more shared knowledge over the course of interaction, and that their estimates about shared knowledge become more accurate over successive trials. Experiment 3 was conducted in order to examine whether the use of intervening questionnaires in the earlier experiments prompted the participants to behave differently than they otherwise would. Although the use of the questionnaires encouraged a more active exchange of information, the overall pattern of behavior exhibited by the participants was not affected by this procedure.

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