Memory for the form and force of declaratives and interrogatives

Memory for the illocutionary force and surface form of direct and indirect speech acts was studied in two recall tasks. Both examined the effects of the context of original presentation on subjects’ ability to recall declarative and interrogative sentences. Subjects more accurately recalled the verbatim form of indirect requests and offers than that of direct assertions and queries. When prompted by contexts that preserved or changed in illocutionary force of a declarative or interrogative, subjects were equally likely to recall sentences originally used as indirect requests and offers. However, they more frequently recalled sentences originally used as direct assertions or queries when prompted by force-preserving contexts than when prompted by force-changing contexts.     

Metalinguistic awareness in first graders: A qualitative perspective

The purpose of this study was to investigate first graders' metalinguistic awareness using children as the direct sources of information rather than utilizing standard inferential probes. Open-ended interviews were conducted with each child for data gathering purposes, and indefinite triangulation (Cicourel, 1974) was employed as a verification technique for providing multiple perspectives with respect to interview data. The data were analyzed for emerging patterns that might reveal ways in which children manifest an awareness of language. Results indicated that underlying social interaction processes appeared to exert at least as equal an amount of influence as cognition in the development of metalinguistics.     

The effects of aging and dual task demands on language production

A digital pursuit rotor task was used to measure dual task costs of language production by young and older adults. After training on the pursuit rotor, participants were asked to track the moving target while providing a language sample. When simultaneously engaged, young adults experienced greater dual task costs to tracking, fluency, and grammatical complexity than older adults. Older adults were able to preserve their tracking performance by speaking more slowly. Individual differences in working memory, processing speed, and Stroop interference affected vulnerability to dual task costs. These results demonstrate the utility of using a digital pursuit rotor to study the effects of aging and dual task demands on language production and confirm prior findings that young and older adults use different strategies to accommodate to dual task demands.     

The costs of doing two things at once for young and older adults: talking while walking,finger tapping,and ignoring speech or noise

Young and older adults provided language samples in response to questions while walking, finger tapping, and ignoring speech or noise. The language samples were scored on 3 dimensions: fluency, complexity, and content. The hypothesis that working memory limitations affect speech production by older adults was tested by comparing baseline samples with those produced while the participants were performing the concurrent tasks. There were baseline differences: Older adults' speech was less fluent and less complex than young adults' speech. Young adults adopted a different strategy in response to the dual-task demands than older adults: They reduced sentence length and grammatical complexity. In contrast, older adults shifted to a reduced speech rate in the dual-task conditions.     

Elderspeak: Speech accommodations to older adults

Ten service providers and 10 caregivers were recorded as they spoke to groups of younger or older adults. Ten-minute speech samples were analyzed for the occurrence of “elderspeak,” systematic speech accommodations directed towards older adults, using measures of syntactic complexity, verbal fluency, prepositional content, lexical choice, discourse organization, speech rate, and other stylistic markers. Both the caregivers and service providers adjusted how they spoke to different audiences: They reduced the length and complexity of their utterances, produced more lexical fillers and sentence fragments, used fewer long words of three or more syllables, more utterances per turn and per topic, and more repetitions when addressing older adults. They also spoke more slowly and paused longer when addressing older audiences. Prepositional content, type-token ratios, diminutives and tag questions, however, did not vary with audience. These findings confirm prior subjective accounts of the use of an “elderspeak” register.     

The roles of dispositional optimism and pessimism in hiv disease progression

Relationships between dispositional optimism and pessimism and the course of HIV infection, determined by changes in viral load and CD4 counts, were studied in a longitudinal cohort of 412 patients on antiretroviral therapy (ART). Multiple regression analyses controlling for baseline levels of disease status, ethnicity, and depressive symptoms demonstrated that higher pessimism at baseline was associated with higher viral load at follow-up (average of 18 months later). Optimism at baseline had a curvilinear relationship with CD4 counts at follow-up. Moderate levels of optimism at baseline predicted the highest CD4 counts at follow-up. Although optimism and pessimism were associated with specific health behaviors (e.g., ART adherence, cigarette use, drug use, dietary practices), none of these behaviors mediated the optimism/pessimism effects. The biologic and behavioral mediators of associations of personality variables with the course of treated HIV infection deserve continued investigation.