Evaluating the Speech of Younger and Older Adults: Age, Gender, and Speech Situation

Abstract

This study examines how listeners arrive at judgments of speech as irrelevant or off-topic (off-target). Older adults and college students evaluated a set of narratives ascribed to speakers differing in age and gender and presented as conversations or interviews. The results show that young and old adults bring different understandings of age and situation to the evaluation task. Older evaluators judged narratives more on-target than younger evaluators. Differences between evaluator age groups were also observed in the effects of speaker age and speech situation: Younger evaluators judged older speakers more on-target than younger speakers, but older evaluators did not; and younger evaluators judged speech in interviews more off-target than older evaluators did. However, both old and young evaluators judged female speakers more on-target than males. This study contributes to our understanding of the role of age stereotypes in evaluating speech, highlighting the listener's role in constructing an interlocutor's speech as off-target.

Audience Design and Social Relations in Aging

“…Varying the age of the listener allowed me to tap into the differences in speech modifications based on with whom the participant was engaging in a task. The fictive listener technique was used successfully with older adults in previous research (Odato & Keller-Cohen, 2009). In that study, older and younger adults were shown pictures of fictive listeners differing by gender and age and were asked to make judgments about narratives attributed to the fictive listener.…”

Judging communicative competence

“…This would suggest that first-year students may have inflated their ratings of the higher quality language skills of older adults compared to younger adults. Odato and Keller-Cohen (2009) also found that younger adults rated older adult speakers more positively. This could suggest that first-year students have a negative stereotype of the older adult, causing them to expect poor language skills.…”

“…Therefore, we can hypothesize that the relevance of conversation may decline with age. Yet, increased off-topic verbosity does not appear to be negatively stereotyped, as demonstrated by Odato and Keller-Cohen (2009). This would suggest that, even if relevance declines with age, interlocutors might not perceive relevance as a primary factor when judging older adults' communication.…”

“…This supports the initial hypothesis that decreased inhibition (a change in frontal lobe function) may be involved in mediating off-topic verbosity in older adults. Odato and Keller-Cohen (2009) furthered this work with the hypothesis that older adults, in general, are perceived to produce more off-topic speech. Participants, both younger and older adults, were asked to read a selection of narratives and rate the speaker's relevance (on or off-topic), talkative-ness, and specificity.…”

“…Offtopic verbosity is the use of abundant speech lacking in focus, or irrelevant to the speech situation. Current literature has suggested that off-topic verbosity is more likely to occur in the elderly population (Arbuckle and Gold, 1993;Pushkar, Basevitz, Arbuckle, Nohara-LeClair, Lapidus, and Peled, 2000;Odato and Keller-Cohen, 2009 measures. This would suggest that the older the speaker, the more off-topic the speaker.…”