Centre for Policy on Ageing



Adults' sentence fragments — who, what, when, where, and why
Author(s)	Susan Kemper
Journal title	Communication Research, vol 19, no 4, August 1992
Publisher	SAGE Publications, London, August 1992
Pages	pp 444-458
Source	Sage Publications Ltd., 6 Bonhill Street, London EC2A 4PU.
Keywords	Cognitive processes ; Communication skills ; Young elderly ; Over 70s.
Annotation	The incidence of sentence fragments - such as "you know" and other redundant fillers or paraphrasing - can be used as a measure of speech fluency. The distribution of sentence fragments was examined in spontaneous narratives told by two groups of adults: a young old group aged 60-74; and an old-old group aged 75-90. Although there was no overall increase in the occurrence of sentence fragments with age, there was a change in where and what type of fragments occurred. Young-old adults were more likely to produce false starts, whereas old-old adults were more likely to produce filled pauses. Both types of fragments were more common in embedded clauses of complex sentences than in the main clauses. Hence the production of sentence fragments appears to be associated with syntactic processing problems that contribute to word-retrieval problems and sentence formation. (RH).
Accession Number	CPA-980728220 A
Classmark	DA: UO: BBA: BBK
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing

...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing.