Life-span changes to adults' language: Effects of memory and genre
Issue Date
1989Author
Kemper, Susan
Kynette, Donna
Rash, Shannon
O'Brien, Kevin
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Three different language samples were collected from a group of young adults, 18 to 28 years of
age, and a group of elderly adults, 60 to 92 years of age: an oral questionnaire eliciting
information about the adults' background, education, and current health and activities; an oral
statement describing the person they most admired; and a written statement recounting the
most significant event in their lives. In addition, the WAIS vocabulary and digit-span tests were
administered to the adults. Age-related changes in the length, clause structure, and fluency of
the adults' oral answers and oral and written statements were investigated. There was an overall
decrement in the complexity of adults' oral and written statements attributable to an age-related
loss of left-branching clauses which occurred in all three language samples. Correlations between
the length, clause, and fluency measures from the language samples and the education,
health, and WAIS vocabulary and digit-span tests revealed that better-educated adults scored
higher on the WAIS vocabulary test, produced longer utterances, and used more right-branching
clauses, and that adults with greater memory capacity, as measured by the WAIS Digits
Backward test, produced more complex utterances and used more right- and left-branching
clauses. Judges found the statements from the elderly adults to be more interesting and clearer
than those from the young adults. This finding suggests that there is a trade-off between producing complex syntactic structures and producing clear and interesting prose.
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Citation
Kemper, S., Kynette, D., Rash, S., O'Brien, K., & Sprott, R. (1989) Life-span changes to adults' language: Effects of memory and genre. Applied Psycholinguistics, 10, 49-66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0142716400008419
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