Chapter 4 Flashcards
Ageing and Language
Introduction
- Almost always cross-sectional studies
- Overlaps
- Still big variances
The role of reading in older peoples lifestyles
- Typical intellectual engagement (TIE): measure of willingness to engage in cognitively demanding activities reading is key predictor of level of TIE
- Health literacy: ability to access and use health care information reducing mortality and increasing quality of life
- 10% of ppl 77+ could not read instruction on medicine container
- Elders read easy light material
Physical constraints
- Worse eye sight, physical decline
- Predictable words are usually skipped when reading not when listening to audiobook
- Hearing loss causes decline in memory, ability to follow conversation,
- Vocal output generally poorer in elder ppl
- Handwriting changes
- Writing speed decreases
General cognitive constraints
- Reading speed odes not change
- Little change in exe movement
- Older need to re-check complex texts more often
- Older have slower processing speed, compensate for it by skipping over predictable words
- Garden path sentences: sentences that appear to be saying one thing but at certain point it becomes clear that other meaning is intended
- Older more dependent on heuristics to compensate for declines in basic skills
- Inhibitory deficit hypothesis: age-related decline in inhibition will cause specific problems with any mental process were inhibition is used
- Pursuit rotor task
- Some skills immune to cognitive decline
Word recognition
• Lexical decision: deciding if a group of letters forms a word
• Naming latency: how quickly participants can read a word aloud
- no differences in age groups
• Morphological processing: processing of word structure remains intact in later life
• Ratcliffe Diffusion model: older adults slower at some aspects of processing but adopted more conservative decision criteria
• Age differences in peripheral rather than central mental processes
• Semantic facilitation
• Hearing words: old not affected by orthographic frequency (taupe, soupe)
• Loss of grey matter could account for poor performance in word recognition
Spelling
- Old Bad at retrieving misspelled words from memory
* Age decline in production of words spelling mistakes increase with age
• Transmission deficit hypothesis
concepts are stored in interconnected “nodes”, ageing weakens connections, new info prone to inefficient processing than older info, recognition easier than recall
Tip of the tongue states
• Retrieval of memory
Pronunciation
- No age differences
* National Adult Reading Test (NART) quick assessor of crystallized intelligence
Semantic processing
(what words mean) declines with age
• Less precise definitions etc
• Due to decline in frontal lobe functioning
• Maybe result of other factors
• Relatively basic semantic processes age resistant
Syntactic processing
- Decline
- Yngve Depth: complex technique that gives a syntactic complexity score t a phrase or sentence declines with age, well correlated with digit span (.76)
- The better the memory, the better the syntax
- Wrap up: when one sentence ends and another starts, reading slows down, the more complex the sentence, the bigger the slowing down
- Young: more details
- Verbosity
- Diaries: language used became simpler over lifespan
- Anaphoric reference: e.g. referring to “he” without specifying which of two previously cited males is meant
- Regression hypothesis: do older ppl regress to a childlike linguistic state
Story comprehension
- Older remember less, generalize more
- Allocation policy: “cut suit according to cloth”
- Maybe decline begins earlier
- Cohort effects
- Old lower comprehension of humor
- Studies do not reflect rl no age differences in naturalistic tasks
Neural compensation
- Changes in neural responses to incoming auditory signals
* Event related potentials (ERT): listening to auditory stimuli Young: left hemisphere, old: right hemisphere
Summary
• Declines in sight and hearing will affect linguistic skills
• Shift to lightweight reading
• General slowing, declining intelligence, changing of reading habits
• Crystallized intelligence may not play major role
• Age related declines in word recognition, syntactic processing, story recall
• Inflated by experimental artefacts (materials, cohort effects,…)
many reading tests are unrealistic
