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Elderspeak is a specialized speech style used by younger adults when addressing the older adults. The speaker makes accommodations including producing shorter, less complex sentences, using more simple vocabulary and using more filler words, fragmented sentences and repetition. Young people also tend to speak at a slower rate and include more pauses. This speech style is often patronizing in nature and resembles baby talk, which refers to how adults address babies and young children. It results from reliance on stereotypes about cognitive abilities of older persons. Younger people tend to believe that aging is associated with cognitive declines, including declines in language processing and production. When conversing with older persons, younger people often make accommodations to their speech based on their beliefs about their conversation partner’s ability, rather than their actual ability. Although some aspects of elderspeak may be beneficial for some recipients, it is generally seen as inappropriate and can hinder intergenerational communication.

Elderspeak and Communication Accommodation
Communication accommodation theory looks at how we modify our speech for our conversation partners. People can change their speech to be more similar to their conversation partners’ speech, which is known as convergence. In other circumstances, people may change their speech to be more distinct, a process known as divergence. Furthermore, these modifications can promote fluidity of conversation and ease of understanding. People tend to draw on stereotypes to infer what types of accommodations need to be made. In terms of intergenerational communication, young people tend to over-accommodate when conversing with older persons. That is, they make more adjustments than necessary. Young people tend to infer that older adults are slower at processing information and more cognitively inflexible. They make these inferences based on their perception of their conversation partner as old, rather than based on information about their conversational ability. This belief leads to more accommodations than necessary. Ryan and colleagues (1986) assessed several strategies used by younger individuals when accommodating to older adults which include:
 * Overaccommodation due to physical or sensory handicaps: speakers perceive interlocutors to be handicapped in a way that affects conversation ability, but the speaker accommodates more than necessary
 * Dependency-related overaccommodation: this occurs in situations where the older person is dependent on the younger person. The younger person’s speech is dominating and controlling. This pattern can be seen in interactions between an older person and their caregiver.
 * Age-related divergence: the young person attempts to emphasize distinctiveness of their ingroup (young) from the outgroup (old). The young person does this by speaking very quickly and using more modern colloquialisms, alienating or accentuating the differences of the older person.
 * Intergroup accommodation: Speaker perceives interlocutors as older, which triggers negative stereotypes about their ability. The speaker makes accommodations based on perceptions about the interlocutor’s ingroup, rather than the person themselves.

Use of Elderspeak
Elderspeak is used in many different contexts by young people when talking to older persons. Research by Susan Kemper demonstrated that both service providers (volunteers) and professional caregivers alike engaged in elderspeak when interacting with the elderly. Furthermore, elderspeak was used regardless of the communicative ability of the older person. It was used when interacting with older adults who were healthy and active community members, as well as those in institutional settings. Surprisingly, caregivers used patronizing speech both when addressing adults with dementia (and reduced communication abilities), as well as those without dementia which demonstrates that age cues are more salient to speakers than mental or physical health cues, and cues about communicative ability. Generally, young adults use an overstated version of elderspeak when addressing impaired older persons. When older adults converse with older people with cognitive impairments, they make speech accommodations to a lesser extent than young people. They speak more slowly and incorporate more pauses, however they do not use more repetition as young people do. It is possible that older speakers may not accommodate their speech as much in order to avoid seeming patronizing.

Consequences of Elderspeak
Popular theories about elderspeak posit that it originates from both actual communication problems associated with older age and negative stereotypes about the competence of older people. These complex origins allow for both positive and negative consequences of elderspeak on how we view older adults.

Advantages
Elderspeak is assumed to facilitate communication with older adults who may have deficits in hearing or cognitive processing. Research shows that elderspeak is beneficial to older adults in certain situations. Older adults often have less trouble communicating when their speaking partner simplifies the structure of their sentences; they experience more benefit from simplified speech than younger adults. As well, when speakers use simpler sentences and more semantic elaboration, older adults show improved performance in tasks such as following directions on a map. Studies have shown that older adults are more likely to interrupt younger speakers to ask for clarification, which may prompt the younger speakers to use more elaboration and reinforce their use of elder speak later on. Research has also found evidence that stressing important words may improve recall in older adults. Elderspeak may be particularly beneficial to older adults suffering from dementia. Alzheimer’s patients, who have significant trouble with sentence comprehension, seem to benefit significantly from repetition of speech and grammatically simpler sentences.

Disadvantages
The biggest problem with elderspeak is the effect it has on how older adults are perceived, both by younger adults and by themselves. Older adults often find elderspeak patronizing and disrespectful. Because younger adults speak to them as if they were less competent, older adults find fewer opportunities to communicate effectively and may experiences declines in self-esteem and become less interested in social interaction. This cycle of communication is often referred to as the “communication predicament of aging”. Adults receiving elderspeak are often judged by the speaker as being not only less competent, but also being in a worse disposition. Interestingly, the same study showed that when using elderspeak, the speaker was judged as having a worse disposition as well. Caretakers of nursing home residents must be particularly careful when using elderspeak. Although elderspeak has been shown to help older adults with dementia and Alzheimer’s in language comprehension, they are not immune to feeling disrespected when it is used. Resisting care is an ongoing problem with dementia patients, and residents of nursing homes are more likely to resist care when their nurse uses elderspeak. Another problem with elderspeak is that it is often used incorrectly. For example, caretakers of adults with Alzheimer’s are often told to speak to their patients more slowly, although slow speech has not been proven to improve comprehension in patients with Alzheimer’s. Although shorter sentences appear to have a beneficial effect on older adults’ communication, factors of elderspeak such as slow speech and exaggerated pitch tend to make older adults feel worse about their own competency, as well as the competency of the speaker ; however, younger adults continue to use elderspeak with these characteristics.