2.1. LANGUAGE IN AGING (LANGUAGE IN HEALTHY OLDER ADULTS)
Language in old age has been an active research area since early experimental investigations in cognitive aging (cited in Craik & Masani, 1967; Riegel & Riegel, 1964). Understanding language is an essential behavior that constructs all the social interactions in daily life. The importance of understanding the language of older adults is presumed to be well explained through the communication problems indicating lower intelligence. Over the life span, language and communication patterns of older adults show variations with the increasing age. Language changes among the older adults may stem from hearing difficulties, understanding language, interacting in noisy environments, accessing …show more content…
Kemper (1986, 1987) claims that as older adults become slower and less accurate in making judgments about syntactically complex sentences, they experience difficulty in both reading and listening tasks including unusually long sentences, which are not fully comprehensible by context alone. Clark- Cotton et al., (2007) agree this fact by propounding that dependent clauses including relative and noun clauses force listeners to use their working memory to repeat sentences as they listen and these difficulties encountered by older adults may also stem from their ability to use syntactic knowledge efficiently. Therefore, it is assumed that older adults comprehend shorter sentences with fewer clauses easily, which may be resulted from age-related linguistic …show more content…
They further argue that discourse comprehension places demands on working memory to integrate concepts and thematic information over multiple sentences and it also provides an opportunity for strong top-down influences, guiding comprehension with heuristics and real world knowledge which increases during adulthood. Actually, there are many studies referring to older adults’ comprehension by laying emphasis on situation models. Situation model is attributed to reader’s real world knowledge, which is represented in the text. What makes situation model different from surface and textbase model is that surface based representations just include the specific meanings of words and the syntactic structure of
Language in old age has been an active research area since early experimental investigations in cognitive aging (cited in Craik & Masani, 1967; Riegel & Riegel, 1964). Understanding language is an essential behavior that constructs all the social interactions in daily life. The importance of understanding the language of older adults is presumed to be well explained through the communication problems indicating lower intelligence. Over the life span, language and communication patterns of older adults show variations with the increasing age. Language changes among the older adults may stem from hearing difficulties, understanding language, interacting in noisy environments, accessing …show more content…
Kemper (1986, 1987) claims that as older adults become slower and less accurate in making judgments about syntactically complex sentences, they experience difficulty in both reading and listening tasks including unusually long sentences, which are not fully comprehensible by context alone. Clark- Cotton et al., (2007) agree this fact by propounding that dependent clauses including relative and noun clauses force listeners to use their working memory to repeat sentences as they listen and these difficulties encountered by older adults may also stem from their ability to use syntactic knowledge efficiently. Therefore, it is assumed that older adults comprehend shorter sentences with fewer clauses easily, which may be resulted from age-related linguistic …show more content…
They further argue that discourse comprehension places demands on working memory to integrate concepts and thematic information over multiple sentences and it also provides an opportunity for strong top-down influences, guiding comprehension with heuristics and real world knowledge which increases during adulthood. Actually, there are many studies referring to older adults’ comprehension by laying emphasis on situation models. Situation model is attributed to reader’s real world knowledge, which is represented in the text. What makes situation model different from surface and textbase model is that surface based representations just include the specific meanings of words and the syntactic structure of