Studies investigating the effects of aging on nonliteral language processing have mainly focused on one sensory modality, for example written vignettes. In the current study, we used a video-based task to examine the effect of healthy aging on social communication perception using a novel database called RISC (Relation Inference in Social Communication). By means of an online recruitment platform, we asked young, middle-aged, and older adults between the ages of 18 and 76 (N = 100) to evaluate videos of actors using different forms of literal and nonliteral language, such as sarcasm or teasing. The participants' task was to infer the speakers' belief and the speakers' intention. Older participants demonstrated lower accuracy in discriminating nonliteral from literal interactions compared to younger and middle-aged groups. When evaluating speaker intentions, older adults judged sarcasm as friendlier compared to literal negative utterances. We also found that the older the participant, the more difficulty they have identifying teasing as insincere. Our results expand on age-related similarities and differences in evaluating speaker intentions and demonstrate the practicality of the RISC database for studying nonliteral language across the lifespan.

研究衰老对非文字语言处理影响的研究主要集中在一种感官方式上，例如书面小插曲。在当前的研究中，我们使用一个基于视频的任务，通过一个名为RISC（社交沟通中的关系推理）的新型数据库，研究了健康老龄化对社交沟通知觉的影响。通过在线招聘平台，我们询问了18至76岁之间的年轻人，中年和老年人（N = 100），以使用不同形式的文字和非文字语言（例如讽刺或戏弄）评估演员的视频。参与者的任务是推断说话者的信念和说话者的意图。与年轻和中年组相比，年龄较大的参与者在区分非文字和文字交流中的准确性较低。在评估说话者的意图时，与字面的负面言语相比，老年人将嘲讽更友善。我们还发现，参与者年龄越大，他们将戏弄为不真诚的难度就越大。我们的研究结果扩展了与年龄相关的相似性和评估说话者意图的差异，并证明了RISC数据库用于研究整个生命周期中非文字语言的实用性。