Differences between young and older adults’ spoken language production in descriptions of negative versus neutral pictures

ABSTRACT

Young and older participants produced oral picture descriptions that were analyzed to determine the impact of negative emotional content on spoken language production. An interaction was found for speech disfluencies: young adults’ disfluencies did not vary, whereas older adults’ disfluencies increased, for negative compared to neutral pictures. Young adults adopted a faster speech rate while describing negative compared to neutral pictures, but older adults did not. Reference errors were uncommon for both age groups, but occurred more during descriptions of negative than neutral pictures. Our findings indicate that negative content can be differentially disruptive to older adults’ spoken language production, and add to the literature on aging, emotion, and cognition by exploring effects within the domain of language production.

Keywords:

• Aging
• Emotion
• Spoken language production
• Speech disfluencies

This research was supported by a Psi Chi Undergraduate Research Grant awarded to Nichol Castro, and served in partial fulfillment of her Honors Program requirements for the Psychology Department of the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Portions of this research were presented at the 2011 meeting of the Rocky Mountain Psychological Association, Salt Lake City UT, and the 2012 meeting of the Cognitive Aging Conference, Atlanta GA. The authors thank Justin Gentry for research assistance, and Lise Abrams, Deborah Burke, Darlene Howard, Michael Kisley, and Katherine White for helpful discussion of the project.

Notes

2. ¹ This phenomenon has been called “affective reactivity” within the literature on schizophrenia. We have chosen to not adopt that term, but rather to simply discuss the measure of reference errors.

3. ² We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this explanation.

4. ³ We excluded the errors Kasl and Mahl (1965) termed “ah errors” (including “ums”, “uhs”, and “ers”). Production of these “ah” terms has been shown to be differently impacted by anxiety than other disfluencies. Specifically, because there are a variety of reasons that a speaker might produce these terms (e.g., to signal that they are intending to continue talking), it is not clear that they should always be considered errors or disfluencies.