An examination of age differences in the production of personal narratives: The impact of familiarity and planning on speech fluency

Stereotypes of elderly persons often depict them as lacking communication competence due to cognitive declines. In general, experimental cognitive research indicates that cognitive processing in the aged may be slowed and/or less efficient. Compared to their younger counterparts, the elderly seem to be at a greater disadvantage on more difficult tasks. Known as the complexity effect hypothesis, this effect suggests that the magnitude of the age differences in performance is proportional to the difficulty of the task. The two experiments reported here examined the temporal and fluency features of narratives produced by younger and older speakers as indicants of underlying cognitive processes. Given that cognitive processing demands are reflected in characteristics of speech production, two experiments were designed to assess the ability of the generalized slowing hypothesis and the complexity effect hypothesis to account for speech fluency. Experiment I examined the interaction of age and task familiarity. In light of research that indicates advance planning reduces cognitive load, Experiment II added a method of preparation factor. The results of both experiments generally indicated that the manipulation of task familiarity did not differentially impact the perceived difficulty of the monologue tasks. In Experiment I, results failed to support the generalized slowing hypothesis or the complexity hypothesis. Results from Experiment II indicated that the opportunity to plan differentially affected younger and older respondents such that older respondents performed more fluently in the spontaneous production condition while younger respondents performed better in the plan condition. The absence of clear age trends and interactions with task familiarity indicated that the generalized slowing hypothesis and complexity effect hypothesis were not supported by the data. Considered together, the results from these two experiments failed to identify clear cognitive processing deficits in the elderly\u27s production of personal narratives. The results supported the idea that the day-to-day communication activities of older adults are relatively unaffected by the aging process