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Evaluating the Speech of Younger and Older Adults: Age, Gender, and Speech Situation

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Journal of Language and Social Psychology
Authors:
Christopher V. Odato
Christopher V. Odato
Christopher V. Odato
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Deborah Keller-Cohen at University of Michigan
Deborah Keller-Cohen
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Abstract

This study examines how listeners arrive at judgments of speech as irrelevant or off-topic (off-target). Older adults and college students evaluated a set of narratives ascribed to speakers differing in age and gender and presented as conversations or interviews.The results show that young and old adults bring different understandings of age and situation to the evaluation task. Older evaluators judged narratives more on-target than younger evaluators. Differences between evaluator age groups were also observed in the effects of speaker age and speech situation: Younger evaluators judged older speakers more on-target than younger speakers, but older evaluators did not; and younger evaluators judged speech in interviews more off-target than older evaluators did. However, both old and young evaluators judged female speakers more on-target than males. This study contributes to our understanding of the role of age stereotypes in evaluating speech, highlighting the listener’s role in constructing an interlocutor’s speech as off-target.
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Evaluating the Speech of
Younger and Older Adults:
Age, Gender, and Speech
Situation
Christopher V. Odato1 and
Deborah Keller-Cohen1
Abstract
This study examines how listeners arrive at judgments of speech as irrelevant or
off-topic (off-target). Older adults and college students evaluated a set of narratives
ascribed to speakers differing in age and gender and presented as conversations or
interviews. The results show that young and old adults bring different understandings
of age and situation to the evaluation task. Older evaluators judged narratives more
on-target than younger evaluators. Differences between evaluator age groups were
also observed in the effects of speaker age and speech situation: Younger evaluators
judged older speakers more on-target than younger speakers, but older evaluators
did not; and younger evaluators judged speech in interviews more off-target than
older evaluators did. However, both old and young evaluators judged female speakers
more on-target than males. This study contributes to our understanding of the role
of age stereotypes in evaluating speech, highlighting the listener’s role in constructing
an interlocutor’s speech as off-target.
Keywords
aging, stereotypes, narrative, gender, speech situation
1University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Corresponding Author:
Christopher V. Odato, Department of Linguistics, 440 Lorch Hall, 611 Tappan St., University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA
Email: cvodato@umich.edu
Journal of Language and Social
Psychology
28(4) 457–475
© The Author(s) 2009
Reprints and permission: http://www.
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0261927X09341954
http://jls.sagepub.com
... With respect to the perception of (linguistically induced) power in public speech, neither speakers' nor participants' gender seemed to play a role (Holtgraves & Lasky, 1999). In interview or conversation contributions, female participants in conversations were perceived as being more on topic (Odato & Keller-Cohen, 2009). We include speaker gender as control factor in our research. ...
... With respect to control variables, three-way interactions were established of speaker gender, participant gender, and framing on attitude toward the speech. Assuming that people like speakers to be on-topic, the main effect of female speakers being appreciated more than male speakers might be explained by women being perceived as more on-topic (Odato & Keller-Cohen, 2009). The three-way interaction indicating that female participants liked the female speaker better with positive framing, while the male participants liked the female speaker better with negative framing, might be explained by the finding that women favor positive over negative information, while men prefer negative over positive information (Sternadori & Wise, 2010). ...
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... Older adults have been found to produce more verbose and tangential language than younger adults, reflected in both objective measures (Arbuckle & Gold, 1993;Dennis & Hess, 2016;James, Burke, Austin, & Hulme, 1998) and listener ratings (Kavé & Nussbaum, 2012;Odato & Keller-Cohen, 2009;Trunk & Abrams, 2009). Some interpret this as a reflection of inhibitory deficits (e.g., Arbuckle & Gold, 1993), whereas others attribute it to a shift in communication goals from informational exchange to social connection (e.g., James et al., 1998;Trunk & Abrams, 2009). ...
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