Abstract

Expressing opinions about different things that happen to us is a daily activity. However, little is known about how particular age groups perform this activity. This research reports some results related to the relationships between sociocultural variables of elderly people from three different cities in Chile (La Serena, Santiago and Concepcion), some temporal aspects of speech, such as response latency time, intra-response pause, and the number of words per turn, and the argumentative quality. 88 interviews were carried out, (44 women and 44 men). One of the important results of our study indicates that the greater the number of words used, the better the argumentative quality, as well as the greater the number of pauses, the better the argumentative quality.