USING ELDERSPEAK WITH OLDER ADULTS

This study examined the use of elderspeak, a speech register targeted at older listeners, during a referential communication task. The task required the listener to reproduce a route drawn on a map following th e speaker's instructions. Young adults were paired with older adults w ho performed naturally or who followed a script simulating dementia to determine if the young adults would modify their fluency, prosody, gr ammatical complexity, semantic content, or discourse style. When paire d with older adults simulating dementia, the young adults' instruction s were longer, more informative, and more repetitious; however, the yo ung adults did not alter their prosody or grammatical complexity. Toge ther with previous findings on practice effects on elderspeak, these f indings suggest that young adults adjust their speech to the perceived communicative needs of older listeners by varying information content but not by varying information delivery.