FACILITATING OLDER ADULTS PERFORMANCE ON A REFERENTIAL COMMUNICATION TASK THROUGH SPEECH ACCOMMODATIONS

This study used a referential communication task to investigate the ef fectiveness of elderspeak, a speech register targeted at older listene rs. The tasks required the listener to reproduce a route drawn on a ci ty map or dot pattern following the speaker's instructions. In the cur rent variant of the task, listeners were prohibited from interrupting or questioning the speakers. Dyads of young-young, older-older, and yo ung-older adults were compared with regard to measures of fluency, pro sody, 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 speec h style when addressing the older listeners. Older listeners did benef it 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 receptiv e problems when interacting with the young adults. These self-reported problems appeared to be triggered by prosodic characteristics of the young adults' speech style.