AGEING

Language loss in the normal elderly (speakers of 70þ and 80þ with no apparent brain damage) varies considerably between individuals. There is often a decline in the receptive skills. Sentence length does not appear to be a major obstacle; but sentence complexity does. The main reason would appear to be increased difficulty in co-ordinating syntactic and semantic processing. This is especially noticeable when older people are called upon to process complex syntactic structures such as subordinate clauses. Their recall of connective links between sentences may also be less precise than that of younger subjects.

 The variation between individuals may reflect the fact that some are more successful than others in developing strategies to compensate for the reduction in syntactic information. They often appear to fall back upon context, using sentence meaning and world knowledge to supplement their understanding. This reliance on semantics leads to difficulty in dealing with sentences which are ambiguous in meaning.

 Many aspects of higher-level comprehension appear unimpaired: for example, the ability to make inferences, to integrate incoming knowledge into a mental representation and to bring world knowledge to bear. But there may be a reduction in the number of factors which the older person’s working memory can handle: hence occasional difficulty in retaining the information necessary for handling pronoun reference or negative sentences. Older people find it easier to recall sentences where the chronological order is the order of mention (After locking the door, she turned off the lights) than those where it is the reverse (Before locking the door, she turned off the lights).

So far as the production of speech is concerned, elderly speakers tend to produce more unfinished sentences than do younger ones, and appear to need more time to assemble their utterances. One suggestion is that there is a general decline in a speaker’s ability to self-monitor, which causes problems with both production and comprehension.

This may be attributable, again, to changes in working memory which reduce the ability to perform multiple tasks.

 The classic syndrome reported by the elderly is difficulty in finding words: they report more frequent Tip of the Tongue experiences than do younger speakers. However, they have a high success rate in finally locating the desired word, and there is no evidence that items are actually ‘lost’ from the lexicon. The chief change seems to be that the process of retrieving lexical items becomes slower, as does the process of making associative links between items. The results are seen in unfinished sentences and a higher incidence of ‘general’ terms (flower for rose, walk for march etc.).

 There has been interest in a theory (the regression hypothesis) that language loss may replicate in reverse the order of acquisition by infants. The hypothesis has not been demonstrated. Though certain linguistic concepts involving space, quantity, temporal relations and subordination do appear to cause problems for some elderly speakers and listeners, there is no evidence of a systematic pattern of loss.

See also: Attrition, Dementia

Further reading: Maxim and Bryan (1994)

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