Understanding the elderly’s everyday language: A mutually enriching dialogue between research and society

The aim of the paper is to illustrate how scientific research and society actually cooperate within the particular framework of the ongoing research project CorpAGEst (Corpus for gestural language in the elderly, UCL, Belgium). In response to socio-economic concerns in aging (Berr et al., 2012), the project aims to investigate the communicative competence of very old healthy people in their natural environment (Chafe, 1992). The CorpAGEst corpus (approx. 120,000 words; 13.5 hrs) comprises face-to-face interviews between an adult and a very old subject (>75 years) living at home or in a residential home. Annotated multimodal data (integrating text, sound, and gesture) (Mondada, 2006) will be especially useful to support new insights in the understanding of the elderly’s everyday language. The hypothesis is that (inter)subjective discourse markers (e.g., you know ‘tu sais’) and gestural units (e.g., gazing towards the interlocutor) can be highly relevant cues to study empathic ability of the elderly (Bailey & Henry, 2008). It is expected that there will be a change in the use of these (inter)subjective units as a function of the social tie between interlocutors (familiar vs. unknown interviewer) (Halberstadt et al., 2011) and of the nature of the task (focus on past events vs. on actual life) (James et al., 1998). The center Le Bien Vieillir, with experts and practitioners working with the elderly (Namur, Belgium), directly collaborates in the project at every step of its development. This guarantees the founding of the research questions in the reality of professionals’ needs. The impact of the cooperation is and will be perceivable in terms of benefits within the following areas: 1. Data collection: contact with residential homes, technical feasibility of interviews in real-world settings, establishment of the interview guide; 2. Results interpretation: complementary perspective; 3. Data accessibility: (meta)data archival in an open-source storage format, freely available for professors, researchers, aging specialists and practitioners; 4. Visibility: website describing the project and its scientific/societal implications; 5. Publication: joint publication of a brochure for the general public; scientific publications, seminars, international conferences/collaborations; 6. Dissemination: groups of discussion on the (non-)verbal communication of elderly people (with professionals, families, friends and/or seniors); university course on multimodality and aging. This collaboration will open up new prospects: (i) enrichment of the discussion of the concrete strategies to be implemented to improve the care for very old people; (ii) developing enriched pragmatic and multimodal annotation systems to study language interaction. References Bailey, P. E. & Henry, J. D. (2008). Growing less empathic with age: Disinhibition of the self-perspective. Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 63B(4), 219-226. Berr, C., Balard, F., Blain, H., Robine, J.-M. (2012). Vieillissement, l’émergence d’une nouvelle population. Medecine-Sciences 28(3), 281-287. Doi: 10.1051/medsci/2012283016 Chafe, W. (1992). The importance of corpus linguistics to understanding the nature of language. In J. Svartvik (ed.), Directions in corpus linguistics (Proceedings of Nobel Symposium 82), Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 79-97. Halberstadt, A., Dennis, P. A. & Hess, U. (2011). The influence of family expressiveness, individuals’ own emotionality, and self-expressiveness on perceptions of others’ facial expressions. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 35, 35-50. Published online in October 2010: DOI 10.1007/s10919-010-0099-5 James, L. E., Burke, D. M., Austin, A. & Hulme, E. (1998). Production and perception of “verbosity” in younger and older adults. Psychology and Aging 13(3), 353-367. Mondada, L. (2006). Video recording as the reflexive preservation and configuration of phenomenal features for analysis. In H. Knoblauch, J. Raab, H.-G. Soeffner, B. Schnettler (eds.), Video Analysis, Bern: Peter Lang