Language & Cognition seminar - Dr Suphasiree Chantavarin

Older adults have often been assumed to produce less fluent speech, but current evidence is minimal and contradictory. Particularly noteworthy is the lack of longitudinal data that would help establish whether a given individual’s disfluency patterns change over time. This talk will present a study that examines changes in disfluency patterns longitudinally, using a novel method involving the analysis of 325 recorded interviews conducted with 91 individuals at several points in their lives. Understanding the trajectory of how disfluency rates change over the lifespan can provide insights into the cognitive mechanisms that underlie changes in speech production in healthy aging.