Adult spoken discourse: the influences of age and education

Abstract

Spoken discourse is regarded as an important component of communication assessment, but data on the discourse characteristics of the adult population, and in particular those who fall into the fastest growing section of the population (those aged over 75), are scant. Therefore, detection of deficit is commonly dependent on the assessor's opinion as to what constitutes normal performance. To determine the effects of age, education and gender on spoken discourse, the conversational interaction and picture description skills of 189 neurologically normal adults were examined. Conversation was appraised with reference to five parameters (initiation, topic maintenance, verbosity, turn taking, reference). Picture description was assessed for relevant content, length, efficiency and the inclusion of extraneous information. Level of education did not affect conversational interaction but in picture description those not educated beyond minimal school leaving produced shorter and less complete descriptions. Picture description content and length were not affected by advancing age but the older elderly (aged 75+) conveyed information with reduced efficiency. Conversational interaction style altered with advancing age, with some suggestion of change in the young elderly (age 60-74), but highly significant differences in respect of the old elderly. Gender had no effect on the parameters of conversation and no significant picture description differences were present in males and females though there were trends towards longer and higher content descriptions in females. The results have important diagnostic implications for those concerned with establishing whether pathology such as stroke has affected communication. On a wider scale, awareness of the effects of advancing age and limited education may facilitate successful communication for all who communicate with the public in a professional capacity.

Age-related effects on speech production: A review

“…Like Le Dorze and Bé dard (1998), Mackenzie (2000) found no age difference in picture description content, but observed differences in the efficiency of retrieving the content, with 'old-old' adults (aged 75-88 years) producing fewer relevant propositions relative to the number of words produced than middle-aged (aged 40-59 years) and 'young-old' (aged 60-74 years) adults. However, unlike Le Dorze and Bé dard, Mackenzie attributed the reduced efficiency to slower visual perception and general cognitive slowing.…”

“…Consistent with Mackenzie (2000), Kemper and Sumner (2001) found no evidence that older adults suffer from lexical deficits. In answer to an autobiographical question, they found that, compared with young adults (aged 18-28 years), older adults (aged 63-88 years) produced utterances that were less dense in propositions (i.e., had lower numbers of propositions per 100 words), but were lexically more diverse, as reflected in higher type/token ratios (i.e., higher numbers of different words relative to the total number of words).…”

“…Older adults produce more words than young adults in answers to autobiographical questions (Ceccaldi, Joanette, Tikhomirof, Macia, & Poncet, 1996;James, Burke, Austin, & Hulme, 1998) and in conversation Bortfeld et al, 2001;Mackenzie, 2000). This age-related increase in the number of words produced in discourse has been associated with (a) language-specific processes involved in lexical access and in the conceptual and syntactic planning of an utterance (Bortfeld et al, 2001), (b) a more general cognitive deficit in inhibiting irrelevant information , and (c) a voluntary change in speech style (Burke, 1997;James et al, 1998).…”

“…They suggested that the amount of irrelevant speech produced in a discourse task depends on the extent to which the task constrains speech. A life-history interview or a referential communication task places fewer constraints on speech production than a picture description task, which might explain why irrelevant information is more likely to intrude in the former than in the latter task context (James et al, 1998;Mackenzie, 2000).…”

“…They examined age differences in the number of words and the amount of off-topic speech produced in conversation and picture description and found that older adults (mean age: 73 years) were more talkative and more often off topic than young adults (mean age: 19 years) when talking about personal subjects but not when describing pictures (see also Mackenzie, 2000). To account for this difference between tasks, James et al pointed to the difference in speech topic and the extent to which personal experiences were relevant to a subject: In talking about personal topics, older adults select a different speech style than young adults because they have different communicative goals-they emphasise descriptions of personal experiences over descriptions of facts.…”