Narrative recall in the elderly: Content, fluency and speech errors in the narrative speech of young, young-old and old-old speakers

During natural ageing, hormonal, psychological, and cognitive changes affect speech production and speech perception. The aim of this study is to investigate the differences in the performance of young-old (60- to 74-year-old) versus old-old (75- to 90-year-old) speakers in oral summaries of stories to which they listened previously and how those results relate to the speech of young adult speakers. For the present study, we have selected narrative recalls performed by fifteen subjects of each age group from BEA (The Hungarian Spontaneous Speech Database). We analysed the contents of those samples, pauses, disfluencies, and speech errors. We found important differences in the oral summaries between young-old and old-old speakers. Considerable individual differences were also attested within each age group (in disfluencies, pauses, etc.). The results suggest a certain degree of dissimilarity in the recalls across age groups, concerning peculiarities of language use along with the expected phonetic and psycholinguistic features