ABSTRACT
Communication is critical to people’s identities, social functioning, and health and wellbeing. Age-related differences in language processing, specifically the degree to which a speaker is fluent during speech production, can influence the ways in which older adults communicate. Despite increases in word retrieval failures, disfluencies, and off-topic speech in some contexts, older adults use more lexically diverse and unique words and possess goals for communicating that result in better narratives. This chapter reviews research that has used various methods to understand how speech fluency contributes to successful communication in older adulthood, as well as the proposed cognitive mechanisms underlying these age-related changes. The chapter then discusses directions for future research through gesture use and bilingualism, both of which have not been extensively researched in older adults.
