THE EFFECTS OF PRACTICING SPEECH ACCOMMODATIONS TO OLDER ADULTS

Tis study evaluated the effects of practice with a referential communi cation task on the form and effectiveness of elderspeak, a speech regi ster targeted at older listeners. The task required the listener to re produce a route drawn on a map following the speaker's instructions. Y oung adults were given extended practice with this task to determine i f they would modify their fluency, prosody, grammatical complexity, se mantic content, or discourse style. The effectiveness of the young spe akers' instructions was also evaluated in terms of how accurately thei r older partners could reproduce the routes and in terms of the older adults' evaluations of their own communicative competence. With practi ce, the young adults' instructions became shorter, simpler, slower, an d more repetitious; these selective changes did not affect the older a dults' accuracy, but did result in lower self-ratings of communicative competence by the older partners. In a second study, a new group of y oung adults was given extended practice with young adults as partners. The practice effects were limited to fluency (sentence length and spe ech rate) and had no effect on the young partners' accuracy or self-ra tings of communicative competence.