Talking to older adults: eye tracking and elicitation evidence for intergenerational accommodation

Abstract

Many older adults experience cognitive changes that introduce barriers to communication. When speaking with them, younger adults may use a listener-directed speech register called intergenerational accommodation. Intergenerational accommodation includes changes to both manner and content of speech. Crucially, these adaptations may reflect younger adults’ concern for helping older adults in conversation, but they can also be interpreted as a social expression of age group membership. Pervasive ageism sometimes prompts younger adults to misjudge their older listeners and results in their speech being perceived as speech patronizing to older adults. Studies have shown that ageist communication can cause negative clinical outcomes and generally breaks down intergenerational relations. Here, three studies investigated how intergenerational accommodation is produced, processed, and perceived by younger and older adults. The first experiment measured intergenerational accommodation during a cooperative game and found that younger adults hyperarticulate significantly for their older partners. The second experiment was a map-based eye tracking task that compared performance between casual, repetitious, simple, and slow speech conditions; simple speech was the only accommodation features that significantly improved gaze behavior to the target over the entire route. The third experiment was an analysis of individual differences within the eye tracking task, using a survey of intergenerational communication as its main outcome. State and trait anxiety significantly predicted some outcomes in the questionnaire, suggesting that individual differences explain important variance in social patterns of intergenerational communication. Ultimately, this dissertation suggests that supporting communication depends on attentiveness, flexibility, and reduced avoidance between generations and allowing individuals to attune to one another as people rather than as members of an age category.