Kemper, S., & Harden, T. (1999). Experimentally disentangling what's beneficial about elderspeak from what's not. Psychology and Aging, 14(4), 656-670.

Kemper, S.; Harden,T.

1999

Kemper, S., & Harden, T. (1999). Experimentally disentangling what's beneficial about elderspeak from what's not. Psychology and Aging, 14(4), 656-670.

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Three studies evaluated different varieties of elderspeak using a referential communication task. Experiment 1 compared the effects of syntactic simplifications and semantic elaborations. Experiment 2 contrasted syntactic simplifications and prosodic exaggerations. Experiment 3 contrasted 2 different syntactic simplification strategies and 2 different prosodic exaggerations. Providing semantic elaborations and reducing the use of subordinate and embedded clauses benefit older adults and improve their performance on the referential communication task, whereas reducing sentence length, slowing speaking rate, and using high pitch do not. The use of short sentences, a slow rate of speaking, and high pitch resulted in older adults' reporting more communication problems. These experiments validate a version of elderspeak that benefits older adults without sounding patronizing and insulting.

The first experiment compared four versions of elder speak produced by orthogonally combining syntactic complexity and semantic elaboration. Then semantic elaborations were provided, syntactic complexity had no effect on performance; when no semantic elaborations were provided, syntactically complex map directions were more difficult to follow than the syntactically simplified versions so that participants completed fewer maps correctly and made more deviations from the correct route.

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