SPEECH ADJUSTMENTS TO AGING DURING A REFERENTIAL COMMUNICATION TASK

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 ma p or array of dots, following the speaker's instructions. Dyads of you ng-young, old-old, and young-old adults were compared with regard to m easures of fluency, prosody, grammatical complexity, semantic content, and speaker and listener style. Although the older speakers showed li ttle variation in response to listener age or task difficulty, the you ng speakers adopted a simplified speech style when addressing the olde r listeners. These simplifications may have been triggered by the verb al responses of 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 a djustments, older adults reported more expressive and receptive proble ms when interacting with the young adults.