Nov 11, 2015

Howie Giles and co-authors Nik and Justine Couplands received the National Communication Association’s “2015 Outstanding Book Award” from the Communication and Aging Division for their volume entitled, “Language, Society and the Elderly”, to be presented at the Annual Meeting, November, Las Vegas.  The book, published in 1991, was the first concerted attempt to provide a social account of language and interaction in later life.  It offers a detailed critique of the cognitive bias of existing studies of elderly people’s language.  In its place, the authors proposed an approach which explains how older people’s life circumstances, concerns, goals and beliefs influence their styles of interaction.  The book showed how their studies of language and interaction can contribute to theory in social gerontology, and to policy and practice in medical and caring contexts. In reviewing it, Jon Nussbaum wrote: “This book is a landmark…. no social gerontologist either inside or outside social psychology or sociolinguistics is producing such interesting research.”