Attitudes Toward Younger and Older Adult Speakers: Effects of Varying Speech Rates

Undergraduates listened to tape recorded voices of either younger (20-22 years) or older (60-65 years) male speakers who varied in their rate of speech (slow, medium, and fast). The listeners evaluated the speakers on various personality and social characteristics, made causal attributions for success or failure of the speakers in hypothetical situations, estimated speaker ages, and rated the voices on several speech parameters. Overall, faster speakers were evaluated more favourably than slower speakers, and older speakers were evaluated less favourably than younger speakers. As predicted, the estimated age of older speakers was elevated when they spoke slowly, but the strong evaluative effects predicted for rate among old speakers were not observed. The prediction that disconfirmation of expectations would lead to especially negative attitudes toward the slow-speaking younger speakers was confirmed, while the predicted favourable impact of fast speech for the older speakers received only slight support. Causal attributions were generally consistent with the other evaluations, with larger effects for speech rate than for age. The complex differences in attributions across the three situations examined suggest that the causal attribution paradigm provides a valuable framework within which to examine the situational determinants of effects for speaker age and rate of speech.