Overcoming Elderspeak: A Qualitative Study of Three Alternatives

This study identifies genres of communication that avoid the features of elderspeak and successfully engage cognitively or physically affected older adults in rich communicative interaction.

The study examined 100 hr of audio- and video-recorded interaction between older Catholic nuns and their caregivers. The data were collected as part of a 7-year study on the linguistic and communicative factors that contribute to successful aging in a Catholic convent infirmary. Data analyzed in this article were selected from the corpus based on 2 criteria: (a) the interaction was absent of elderspeak and (b) the interaction was between a communicatively or cognitively impaired older adult and a caregiver.

Linguistic analysis of the interactions revealed 3 alternatives to elderspeak that maintain lexically and grammatically rich communication while maintaining minimal opportunity for communicative failure or breakdown. These include: (a) offered and requested blessings, (b) jokes, and (c) narratives.

These 3 communicative strategies offer examples of lexically and grammatically complex ways to communicate with older adults who have little other opportunity for similarly complex interaction and may reduce resistiveness to care, and linguistic isolation, which has been linked to cognitive decline.