Interactive remembering: Insights into the communicative competence of older adults

This paper challenges some of the traditional views of older adults' speech by considering conversational narrative interaction among three elderly peers from a life-span developmental perspective of aging. A range of pragmatic models developed primarily for younger adults' talk are extended to facilitate an analysis of interaction among elderly peers, showing how the speakers in the data use sophisticated strategies to recall events and establish communicative bridges between conversation participants. The differing social and communicative goals of older adults are examined, contrasting their communicative, and particularly narrative, competency with negative perceptions of elderly discourse, thus demonstrating that to view aging as synonymous with linguistic decline is unfounded.