How scenes containing visual errors affect speech fluency in young and older adults

ABSTRACT

We compared young and older adults’ speech during an error detection task, with some pictures containing visual errors and anomalies and other pictures error-free. We analyzed three disfluency types: mid-phrase speech fillers (e.g., It’s a little, um, girl), repetitions (e.g., He’s trying to catch the- the birds), and repairs (e.g., She- you can see her legs). Older adults produced more mid-phrase fillers than young adults only when describing pictures containing errors. These often reflect word retrieval problems and represent clear disruptions to fluency, so this interaction indicates that the need to form and maintain representations of novel information can specifically compromise older adults’ speech fluency. Overall, older adults produced more repetitions and repairs than young adults, regardless of picture type, indicating general age-related increases in these disfluencies. The obtained patterns are discussed in the context of the Transmission Deficit Hypothesis and other approaches to age-related changes in speech fluency.

KEYWORDS:

• Speech production
• speech fluency
• picture description
• error description
• Transmission Deficit Hypothesis

Acknowledgments

We thank Toni Kooy for allowing us to analyze the transcripts from her research, and Justin Gentry for research assistance. Portions of this research were presented at the 2014 meeting of the Rocky Mountain Psychological Association, Salt Lake City, UT, USA and the 2014 meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Long Beach, CA, USA.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.