Facilitating older adults' performance on a referential communication task through speech accommodations

This study used a referential communication task to investigate the effectiveness of elderspeak, a speech register targeted at older listeners. The tasks required the listener to reproduce a route drawn on a city map or dot pattern following the speaker's instructions. In the current variant of the task, listeners were prohibited from interrupting or questioning the speakers. Dyads of young-young, older-older, and young-older adults were compared with regard to measures of fluency, prosody, grammatical complexity, semantic content, and speaker style. The older speakers showed little variation in response to listener age or task difficulty whereas the young speakers adopted a simplified speech style when addressing the older listeners. Older listeners did benefit from these speech adjustments with regard to the accuracy of their maps and dot patterns. Despite the effectiveness of the young adults' speech adjustments, older adults reported more expressive and receptive problems when interacting with the young adults. These self-reported problems appeared to be triggered by prosodic characteristics of the young adults' speech style.