Conference talk: Revisiting off-target verbosity
Chris Odato and Debby Keller-Cohen presented their paper, “Revisiting off-target verbosity: Discourse context and speaker identity” at the Cognitive Aging conference held in Atlanta April 10-13.
Abstract
The claim that some older adults talk at length on irrelevant topics has spawned research on what has become known as “off-target verbosity” (OTV). In prior research, OTV has been attributed to speaker characteristics—inhibition (Arbuckle, Pushkar and colleagues) or communicative strategies (James et al., 1998). Out study examined the potential of discourse context and speaker identity to influence perceptions of these speech characteristics.
Forty older adults (age 70+) and forty college students participated in an experiment testing the effects of Participant Age (older/younger), Speaker Age (older/younger), Speaker Gender and Discourse Context (interview/conversation). Participants evaluated transcripts on five measures: focus, talkativeness, clarity, interest and the extent to which the speaker was off-target. The content of the speech represented in the transcripts was held constant while the context in which it was produced and the age and gender of the speaker to whom it was attributed varied between participants.
Age proved to be important in several ways. Overall, older participants were more generous in their evaluations. Also, speech was rated as more interesting when attributed to older speakers. In addition, there were significant interactions between research participant age and discourse context: younger, but not older participants found the speech represented in the transcripts more focused in the conversation context. Gender too was found to enter into evaluations: speech was seen as more focused and clearer when attributed to a female speaker.
This study points to the importance of identifying what analytic categories raters/listeners bring to the task of evaluating others’ speech.