How does age impact understanding of epistemic adverbs in health communication?

Objective: Not much is known about how one's understanding of words may differ with age. Here we explore how epistemic adverbs - as used in health communication to indicate degrees of uncertainty and risk - are understood by older and younger monolingual speakers of Australian English.

Methods: We used an online dissimilarity rating task with sentence pairs presented as first and second doctor opinions which differed only with respect to the embedded epistemic adverbs (e.

The impact of bilinguality and language context on the understanding of epistemic adverbs in health communication: the case of English and Russian.

Aim: To explore how English epistemic adverbs, as used in health communication, are understood by speakers depending on their first language (L1) and language context.

Methods: We used an online dissimilarity rating task with paired doctors' opinions which differed only with respect to the embedded epistemic adverbs (e.g.