Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Effect Of Comprehension Feedback And Listener Age On Speech Complexity, Tara Lineweaver, Paul Hutman, Christopher Ketcham, John Bohannon

Tara T. Lineweaver

Forty college-aged participants told a story and gave verbal walking directions to either a same-age peer or a 75-year-old adult. The listeners gave some participants comprehension feedback and gave other participants mixed comprehension and noncomprehension feedback. Analyses examined length of utterance immediately preceding or following feedback cues. Participants did not globally simplify their speech when talking to the older compared with the young adult. However, speech was sensitive to comprehension feedback from both listeners, and listener age affected speech complexity by influencing the magnitude of this fine tuning effect. Participants simplified their speech more in response to feedback cues from …