With a little help from familiar interlocutors: real-world language use in young and older adults

Abstract

Objectives

Functional psychologists are concerned with the performance of cognitive activities in the real world in relation to cognitive changes in older age. Conversational contexts may mitigate the influence of cognitive aging on the cognitive activity of language production. This study examined effects of familiarity with interlocutors, as a context, on language production in the real world.

Method

We collected speech samples using iPhones, where an audio recording app (i.e. Electronically Activated Recorder [EAR]) was installed. Over 31,300 brief audio files (30-second long) were randomly collected across four days from 61 young and 48 healthy older adults in Switzerland. We transcribed the audio files that included participants’ speech and manually coded for familiar interlocutors (i.e. significant other, friends, family members) and strangers. We computed scores of vocabulary richness and grammatical complexity from the transcripts using computational linguistics techniques.

Results

Bayesian multilevel analyses showed that participants used richer vocabulary and more complex grammar when talking with familiar interlocutors than with strangers. Young adults used more diverse vocabulary than older adults and the age effects remained stable across contexts. Furthermore, older adults produced equally complex grammar as young adults did with the significant other, but simpler grammar than young adults with friends and family members.

Conclusion

Familiarity with interlocutors is a promising contextual factor for research on aging and language complexity in the real world. Results were discussed in the context of cognitive aging.

Keywords:

• Grammatical complexity
• vocabulary richness
• social contexts
• cognitive aging
• Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR)

Acknowledgements

Mike Martin is also affiliated with (1) Center for Gerontology, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, (2) Collegium Helveticum, Zurich, Switzerland, and (3) School of Psychology, the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. We thank the team of research assistants who were dedicated to produce high quality coding of EAR data. The data, analyses scripts, and results are available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/hcjzq/).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Hedwig Widmer Stiftung awarded to Minxia Luo; University of Zurich under Forschungskredit (Grant no. K-63213-03-01) awarded to Burcu Demiray; and Velux Stiftung (Grant 917) awarded to Mike Martin.