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KMID : 0379220140340030457
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Journal of Korea Gerontological Society
2014 Volume.34 No. 3 p.457 ~ p.473
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The Examination of the Inhibition Deficit and the Pragmatic Change Hypothesis for Off-topic Speech Styles between Young and Old Adults
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Jin Young-Sun
Kim Young-Kyoung
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Abstract
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Off-topic speech (OTS) is a type of utterance that may start out on topic but quickly becomes prolonged, unconstrained, and irrelevant to the present topic at hand. A couple of hypotheses are considered appropriate in explaining the reason for OTS production. Inhibitory deficit hypothesis posits that OTS is caused by an age-linked deficit in inhibiting the irrelevant information. The other one is the pragmatic change hypothesis, which argues that young and old adults will show a different speech style both in quantity and in quality as a result of different communicative goals they hold for their speech. Although various tests have been administered in study 1, the interference scores of Stroop Task and letter fluency score of COWAT test were the only measures that proved to be significant for OTS production ratios. In study 2, the total amount of OTS production was higher for the old than for the young group. However, the separate analysis of three dimensions(focus, clarity, talkativeness) in OTS production revealed that old adults produced roughly the same number of words for both episodic and procedural topics, whereas young adults described more briefly for procedural topics than for episodic ones. These findings provide a limited support for the inhibitory deficit hypothesis but the pragmatic change hypothesis was not confirmed. We discussed the implications and limitations of this study and provided suggestions for future studies.
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KEYWORD
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OTS , inhibitory deficit hypothesis , pragmatic change hypothesis , inhibitory control of frontal lobe , communicative goal
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