Effect of off-target verbosity on communication efficiency in a referential communication task.

Arbuckle, Tannis Y.; Nohara-LeClair, Michiko; Pushkar, Dolores

doi:10.1037/0882-7974.15.1.65

Cited by 63 publications

(68 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Individuals who are rated as high in OTV show a consistent pattern of abundant, irrelevant speech that goes far beyond the normal initiation and elaboration of topics found in conversational exchanges. The prevalence of high OTV increases after age 60 years, although a high level of OTV is characteristic of only a small minority of older adults [2]. Psychosocial factors, including greater extraversion and psychosocial stress, are associated with higher levels of OTV, but do not explain the age-associated increase in its prevalence.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…These two measures were combined by principal-components analysis into a single OTV score. Individuals with extreme OTV scores were deliberately oversampled in selecting the phase 2 sample, with approximately one sixth of the 196 phase 2 participants being drawn from each of the highest and lowest 15% of the original distribution and two thirds from the middle 50% [2].…”

Section: Study Participants and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Two studies have supported this model with respect to competence in achieving conversational goals. Individuals showing high levels of OTV in a standardized laboratory interview were less successful in conversing informally with an agematched peer [5] and less efficient in conveying descriptive information about ambiguous stimuli in a referential communication task [2]. The objective of the present study was to examine the more general prediction of the model, namely that a high OTV level is related to diminished everyday competence.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Off-Target Verbosity, Everyday Competence, and Subjective Well-Being

Arbuckle¹,

Pushkar²,

Bourgeois³

et al. 2004

Gerontology

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Background: Off-target verbosity (OTV), defined as prolific speech that is lacking in focus, is exhibited by relatively few older adults, but increases in prevalence with age. Objective/Methods: The hypothesis that a high level of OTV is associated with declining competence in other aspects of everyday life was examined in 142 older adults, previously screened for the level of OTV. Competence was assessed based on self-reported changes since age 50 years in quality and quantity of engagement in eleven domains of instrumental and voluntary activities of everyday life. Results: Path models indicated that a high level of OTV was associated with a decreased competence in everyday activities and was indirectly linked, through competence, with lower well-being and greater loneliness. With competence level controlled, a high level of OTV directly predicted less loneliness. Conclusions: These findings support the hypothesis that a high level of OTV is symptomatic of a more general decline in competence and of less successful aging. However, a high level of OTV also entails a strong motivation for talking to others and thus may offer protection against loneliness.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Section: Study Participants and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Off-Target Verbosity, Everyday Competence, and Subjective Well-Being

Arbuckle¹,

Pushkar²,

Bourgeois³

et al. 2004

Gerontology

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“…Within a group ranging in age from 63-95 years, Arbuckle et al (2000) found that the older adults produced more irrelevant personal information than the younger adults in a life-history interview but not in referential communication about tangram figures. In the life-history interview, participants with high verbosity scores made up 5% of the participants from the youngest age group (aged 63-69 years) but 46% of the participants from the oldest group (aged 85-95 years).…”

Section: Ageing and Speech Production 243mentioning

confidence: 99%

Age-related effects on speech production: A review

Mortensen

Meyer

Humphreys

2006

Language and Cognitive Processes

143

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In discourse, older adults tend to be more verbose and more disfluent than young adults, especially when the task is difficult and when it places few constraints on the content of the utterance. This may be due to (a) language-specific deficits in planning the content and syntactic structure of utterances or in selecting and retrieving words from the mental lexicon, (b) a general deficit in inhibiting irrelevant information, or (c) the selection of a specific speech style. The possibility that older adults have a deficit in lexical retrieval is supported by the results of picture naming studies, in which older adults have been found to name objects less accurately and more slowly than young adults, and by the results of definition naming studies, in which older adults have been found to experience more tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states than young adults. The available evidence suggests that these age differences are largely due to weakening of the connections linking word lemmas to phonological word forms, though adults above 70 years of age may have an additional deficit in lemma selection

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“…12 performance, affecting how efficiently the mental lexicon can be searched for words with the appropriate initial letter and how efficiently a text base can be searched for answers to comprehension questions. Those with higher P-Density scores read more rapidly (requiring fewer sec per word) and generated more items meeting the fluency criterion in the available time.Arbuckle, Nohara-LeClair, & Pushkar (2000) have reported that speakers rated high in off-target verbosity also perform poorly on tests of inhibition, including initial letter fluency. They also report that speakers rated high in off-target verbosity use more words and hedges during a referential communication tasks and they refer to such speakers as "inefficient communicators."…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The structure of verbal abilities in young and older adults.

Kemper¹,

Sumner²

2001

Psychology and Aging

250

166

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Abstract:Four measures of verbal ability derived from language sample analysis as well as 11 other measures of vocabulary, verbal fluency, and memory span were obtained from a sample of young adults and a sample of older adults. Factor analysis was used to analyze the structure of the 11 vocabulary, fluency, and span measures for each age group. Then an "extension" analysis was performed using structural modeling techniques to determine how the language samples measures were related to the other measures. One language sample measure of grammatical complexity was associated with measures of working memory including reading span and digit span; two measures, sentence length in words and a measure of lexical diversity, were associated with the vocabulary measures; the fourth measure, propositional density, was associated with the fluency measures as a measure of processing efficiency. The structure of verbal abilities in young and older adults is somewhat different, suggesting age differences in processing efficiency affecting sentence length, verbal fluency, and reading speed. Text of paper:The . The structure of verbal abilities in young and older adults. Psychology and Aging, 16, 312-322. Publisher's official version: http://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0882-7974.16.2.312. Open Access version: http://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/dspace/. The Structure of Verbal Abilities in Young and Older AdultsVerbal abilities in adulthood have been traditionally studied by testing older adults' abilities to produce definitions (Wechsler, 1981), select synonyms (Shipley, 1940), pronounce phonologically irregular words (Grober, Sliwinski, Schwartz, & Saffran, 1991), name pictures or drawings (Dunn, Dunn, & Dunn, 1997), and rapidly retrieve words (Borkowski, Benson, & Spreen, 1967). Across a wide range of tests both longitudinally and cross-sectionally, vocabulary has been shown to increase throughout the middle adult years but to decline in late adulthood (Albert, Heller, & Milberg, 1988;Botwinick & Siegler, 1980;Eisdorfer & Wilkie, 1973;Hultsch, Hertzog, Dixon, & Small, 1998;Schaie, 1983 Schaie, , 1996Schaie & Willis, 1993).Adopting a different approach, Kemper and her colleagues have traced age-related changes to verbal ability by analyzing spontaneous speech and writing samples. Language sample analysis has been traditionally used to assess children's mastery of vocabulary and grammar (Stromswold, 1996) although experimental techniques have been more recently developed to probe children's understanding of specific grammatical constructions (McKee, 1996) and maternal vocabulary inventories (Fenson, Dale, Reznick, Thal, Bates, Hartung, Pethick, & Reilly, 1991) have been developed to standardize the assessment of children's vocabulary. In a series of studies, Kemper and her colleagues investigated older adults' use of complex syntactic constructions in oral and written language samples (Kemper, 1992;Kemper, Kynette, Rash, Sprott, & O'Brien, 1989;Kemper, Rash, Kynette, & Norman, 1990;Kynette & Kemper, 1986). For example, Kemper (19...

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Effect of off-target verbosity on communication efficiency in a referential communication task.

Cited by 63 publications

References 22 publications

Off-Target Verbosity, Everyday Competence, and Subjective Well-Being

Off-Target Verbosity, Everyday Competence, and Subjective Well-Being

Age-related effects on speech production: A review

The structure of verbal abilities in young and older adults.

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