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Older adults are often exposed to elderspeak, a specialized speech register linked with negative outcomes. However, previous research has mainly been conducted in nursing homes without considering multiple contextual conditions. Based on a novel contextually-driven framework, we examined elderspeak in an acute general versus geriatric German hospital setting. Individuallevel information such as cognitive impairment (CI) and audio-recorded data from care interactions between 105 older patients (M = 83.2 years; 49% with severe CI) and 34 registered nurses (M = 38.9 years) were assessed. Psycholinguistic analyses were based on manual coding (k = .85 to k = .97) and computer-assisted procedures. First, diminutives (61%), collective pronouns (70%), and tag questions (97%) were detected. Second, patients’ functional impairment emerged as an important factor for elderspeak. Our study suggests that functional impairment may be a more salient trigger of stereotype activation than CI and that elderspeak deserves more attention in acute hospital settings.
This paper presents the concept of the "participant perspective" as an approach to the study of spoken language. It discusses three aspects of this concept and shows that they can offer helpful tools in spoken language research. Employing the participant perspective provides us with an alternative to many of the approaches currently in use in the study of spoken language in that it favours small-scale, qualitative research that aims to uncover categories relevant for the participants. Its results can usefully complement large-scale studies of phenomena on all linguistic dimensions of talk.