The Effects of Age on Using Prosody to Convey Meaning and on Judging Communicative Effectiveness

We tested the effects of aging on the use of prosody to convey meaning and the ability to monitor communicative effectiveness. Participants read aloud ambiguous sentences with the goal of clearly communicating one designated meaning. Young and older adults produced intonational boundaries consistent with the designated meaning equally often, but listener judgments indicated that older adults disambiguated the sentences more often than chance and young adults did so only marginally more often than chance. Young adults believed they communicated their message clearly, and older adults evaluated their own communication even more favorably. Participants were more confident for structurally ambiguous sentences than for lexically ambiguous sentences (which cannot be differentiated through prosody), and older adults demonstrated more overconfidence than young adults for both types of ambiguous sentences.