Abstract
Language use is shaped by a pressure to communicate efficiently, yet the tendency towards redundancy is said to increase in older age. The longstanding assumption is that saying more than is necessary is inefficient and may be driven by age-related decline in inhibition (i.e. the ability to filter out irrelevant information). However, recent work proposes an alternative account of efficiency: In certain contexts, redundancy facilitates communication (e.g., when the colour or size of an object is perceptually salient and its mention aids the listener’s search). A critical question follows: Are older adults indiscriminately redundant, or do they modulate their use of redundant information to facilitate communication? We tested efficiency and cognitive capacities in 200 adults aged 19–82. Irrespective of age, adults with better attention switching skills were redundant in efficient ways, demonstrating that the pressure to communicate efficiently continues to shape language use later in life.
Highlights
Language use is shaped by a pressure to communicate efficiently, yet the tendency towards redundancy is said to increase in older age
When discussing procedural life events, younger adults expressed a preference for succinctness, while older adults expressed a preference for expressiveness, which may explain why older adults displayed greater off-topic verbosity in that context
The same participants demonstrated greater variability on switching performance. Based on these initial findings, which revealed no role for inhibition in referential choice or age-related decline, we did not include inhibition in our main analyses. (Note that, as predicted, the inclusion of inhibition in the main analysis yielded no significant main effect of inhibition or interactions with inhibition.) Instead, we focused on the role of switching in predicting referential efficiency across the lifespan
Summary
Language use is shaped by a pressure to communicate efficiently, yet the tendency towards redundancy is said to increase in older age. A competing account, the inhibitory deficit hypothesis, challenges these findings, providing an alternative explanation for older adults’ behaviour: Off-topic verbosity is not confined to specific contexts (e.g., autobiographical ones), but rather extends www.nature.com/scientificreports to all aspects of language production as it is caused by age-related deficits in the ability to inhibit irrelevant information[14,15,16] Supporting this hypothesis, Arbuckle et al.[17] found that older adults with high off-topic verbosity were more likely to use redundant descriptions in a task that did not involve personal narratives, but that tested referential communication (i.e. the way in which we refer to people or things). Instead of focusing solely on the informational value of a description, theories of efficiency should consider its discriminatory value in the visual context
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