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Journal of Language and Social Psychology
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Evaluating the Speech of Younger and Older Adults: Age, Gender, and Speech Situation

Christopher V. Odato

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA, cvodato{at}umich.edu

Deborah Keller-Cohen

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

This study examines how listeners arrive at judgments of speech as irrelevant or off-topic (off-target). Older adults and college students evaluated a set of narratives ascribed to speakers differing in age and gender and presented as conversations or interviews.The results show that young and old adults bring different understandings of age and situation to the evaluation task. Older evaluators judged narratives more on-target than younger evaluators. Differences between evaluator age groups were also observed in the effects of speaker age and speech situation: Younger evaluators judged older speakers more on-target than younger speakers, but older evaluators did not; and younger evaluators judged speech in interviews more off-target than older evaluators did. However, both old and young evaluators judged female speakers more on-target than males. This study contributes to our understanding of the role of age stereotypes in evaluating speech, highlighting the listener’s role in constructing an interlocutor’s speech as off-target.

Key Words: aging • stereotypes • narrative • gender • speech situation

This version was published on December 1, 2009

Journal of Language and Social Psychology, Vol. 28, No. 4, 457-475 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0261927X09341954
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