Age Doesn't Matter, But Speech Rate Does: A Longitudinal Corpus Study of Disfluencies (130)
Eleonora Beier, Suphasiree Chantavarin, and Fernanda Ferreira (University of California, Davis)
Summary by Brett Myers, Digital Content Associate Editor
This recap is part of a special series of session summaries
from the Psychonomic Society's 61st Annual Meeting. To read the rest of the series, click here.
Slowed Speech Rate In Older Adults...Or Do Young People Just Talk Too Fast?
There are normal changes with healthy cognitive aging, and in language production, older adults tend to produce more disfluent speech. One might think of this gentleman trying to recall the phrase: “baked in a buttery flaky crust.”
Disfluent speech often has more frequent and longer pauses. It has been suggested that older individuals may have difficulty with word retrieval, and slowing their speech buys more time to think of the next word.
Some studies suggest that disfluencies increase with age, but others suggest there is no relationship. Ferreira’s lab set out to resolve this discrepancy using a longitudinal study that examined the rate of disfluencies across age.
They created a corpus of YouTube videos of famous individuals speaking in interviews. There was a minimum of three interviews per person, and each interview was at least seven years apart. They measured age, speech rate (words per second), and disfluency rate (the number of disfluencies divided by total word count) for each video clip. The specific disfluencies they looked for were filled pauses, repeats, and repairs.
They found no effect of age on disfluency rate, but there was a significant decline in speech rate with age. Furthermore, they found that speech rate was related to word frequency, lexical diversity, and filled pauses (leading to longer sentences).
Ultimately, older individuals tend to have a slower speech rate but not necessarily more disfluencies. Instead, individual differences in speech style—such as speech rate or word choice—may predict disfluencies.
Print Page
