A comparison of narratives told by younger and older adults

The few studies that have examined verbal discourse in both young and older adults have yielded inconsistent results with respect to talkativeness and story quality. The disparity may arise from methodological differences. In this study the authors examined word count, irrelevant utterances, and ratings of quality of stories told by 24 young (mean age = 19.21) and 24 old (mean age = 72.13) adults. The authors found minimal age differences. A separate sample of 10 young and 10 older adults of ages similar to those of the storytellers read and rated all the stories. Raters were highly variable in their subjective evaluations of story quality, although satisfactory generalizability coefficients can be achieved with a sufficiently large number of raters. Most studies of discourse quality, however, use few raters, which produces unreliable measurement that can contribute to the inconsistent results reported in the literature.