Judges found statements from elderly adults more interesting and clearer than those from young adults, suggesting a trade-off between syntactic complexity and clear, interesting prose¶
Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · associationalr1·q2
Currency · newest study 1989 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person
Subclaims¶
Reading the evidence codes
q is the design tier, i the impact, n the sample, and the kind with its r
the rigour judged within that kind: what each code means.
This claim: no standardized effect is recorded in observations/ for it yet, so no benchmark reading is possible.
q2 i? Raters judged elderly adults' statements to be more interesting and clearer than young adults' statements. → Kemper 1989
Evidence¶
Kemper 1989¶
Kemper, S., Kynette, D., Rash, S., O'Brien, K., & Sprott, R. (1989). Life-span changes to adults' language: Effects of memory and genre. Applied Psycholinguistics, 10, 49-66. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716400008419
q2 · i? · associational · r1
Judgment task in which raters evaluated the statements produced by the young and elderly adult samples. The article reports that "Judges found the statements from the elderly adults to be more interesting and clearer than those from the young adults."
"Judges found the statements from the elderly adults to be more interesting and clearer than those from the young adults."
Discussion¶
Related Claims¶
- Elderly adults show an overall decrement in the complexity of oral and written statements attributable to an age-related loss of left-branching clauses across all three language samples — related
- Adults with greater memory capacity, measured by WAIS Digits Backward, produced more complex utterances and used more right- and left-branching clauses — related
Page metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
type |
claim |
id |
elderly-statements-judged-clearer-more-interesting |
title |
Judges found statements from elderly adults more interesting and clearer than those from young adults, suggesting a trade-off between syntactic complexity and clear, interesting prose |
description |
Judges found statements from elderly adults more interesting and clearer than those from young adults, suggesting a trade-off between syntactic complexity and clear, interesting prose |
status |
review |
evidence_strength |
moderate |
newest_evidence |
1989 |
generated |
by process:wiki-ingest on 2026-10-17 |
trust |
unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content |
sources |
1 — kemper-1989 |
Frontmatter is the page's machine-readable record — see the Schema & Guide.