Does ‘elderspeak’ work? the effect of intonation and stress on comprehension and recall of spoken discourse in old age

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    For monolingual settings, there are studies of communication in geriatric wards that have focused on nurses' speech style when addressing older residents (Grainger, 2008; see also Lanceley, 1985a). These styles have been dubbed “secondary baby talk” (Caporael, 1981, p.746) or “elderspeak” (Cohen & Faulkner, 1986, p.91) with implications of being nurturing, patronizing, or even insulting (Grainger, 1993; Small, Huxtable, & Walsh, 2009). Discussing elderspeak, Williams, Herman, Gajweski, and Wilson (2009) considers terms of endearment as diminutive when directed towards people with dementia.

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    Previous studies have reported that these characteristics may either be beneficial or harmful in accommodating older listeners with communication difficulties. Some features of elderspeak can help older adults, especially those with dementia or Alzheimer's disease (AD), understand ongoing communication and improve performance in certain circumstances (e.g., Cohen and Faulkner, 1986; Kemper and Harden, 1999). For example, Kemper and colleagues (1996) found that older adults made fewer errors while searching a map when instructions were provided in elderspeak.

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    In that sense, syllable stress in a word has been shown to indicate the rhythm of a word, which may be an additional prosodic cue which older adults with difficulties to perceive the temporal fine structure of a word may use to maintain speech perception despite of proceeding atrophy. For example, marked prosodic elements such as intonation and stress in speech, also called “elderspeak,” have been shown to be helpful for older adults to perceive speech and improve comprehension (Cohen and Faulkner, 1986). Similarly, older adults have been shown to be sensitive to prosodic speech cues to at least the same extent as younger adults (Wingfield et al., 1992, 2000).

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    Although the initial search through memory might have failed to elicit a desired answer, some low-level persistent activation of related information might have rendered the correct answer more accessible. Older adults’ TOT experiences support this claim in that they have more spontaneous retrievals or “pop ups” of the correct answers compared to younger adults (Burke et al., 1991; Cohen & Faulkner, 1986). they tend to require more time to resolve TOT states (Burke et al., 1991), and they are also more likely to resolve most of them (Heine, Ober, & Shenaut, 1999) than are younger adults.

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