Addressee-specific narratives in older age: A qualitative study of narratives from two different groups of older speakers

Karl, Katrin B. (10 March 2022). Addressee-specific narratives in older age: A qualitative study of narratives from two different groups of older speakers (Unpublished). In: CLARe 5. online. 09.-.10.03.2022.

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The ability to tell stories is considered central: it constitutes identity and is essential for adequate functioning in society (cf. McCabe 1996). By analysing narratives, we have to consider that every narrative is embedded in a specific communication situation, which includes a narrator, a narrative and an addressee. There are studies on narratives of older people that focus on the narrator and the narratives (cf. Gerstenberg 2011; Kemper et al. 1990). However, the role of the addressee and the accompanying necessary pragmatic skills of the narrator have not been considered so far.
This talk focuses on the question of how people aged 70 to 80 shape narratives in an addressee-specific way. For this study, the MAIN-assessment was used, by which narratives of picture stories were collected and evaluated on their macrostructure in a structured way (cf. Gagarina et al. 2019). Each person was asked to tell two picture stories, one addressed to an adult and the other to a child.
In parallel, cognitive tests were administered to assess cognitive performance. A total of eight German-speaking monolingual people were interviewed in 90-minute meetings. All subjects showed unremarkable scores in a screening for executive functions but differed in scores for the month ordering task and the Benton Test. These working memory scores led to a division of the subjects into two groups of four: a higher-performing group and a lower-performing group.
The narratives of each person were evaluated on macrostructure following the MAIN-protocol, and the embedding of the story was analysed. This led to an intrapersonal comparison of the narratives to the different addressees, on the one hand, and a comparison between the two groups, on the other hand.
The results demonstrate that the group of higher performers showed differences in their narratives to the two addressees – the narratives to children were more explicitly designed, scored higher in the macrostructure and had a differentiated embedding. These differences were not found in the group of lower performers – their narratives were not designed in an addressee-specific way and, overall, were similar to the narratives of the higher performers to adults: they showed no embeddings and had lower scores in the macrostructure.
Hence, the ability to shape a story in an addressee-specific way was observable in the group of higher performers and not in the group of lower performers. It seems possible that this ability is lost in parallel with other cognitive abilities (working memory), which is an interesting and promising approach for larger follow-up studies.

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