Language of the young and old
Dec. 13th, 2010 09:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
philenaIn my psycholinguistics seminar, we finished up a week or so ago with a discussion of the following paper:
Kemper, Susan, Marilyn Thompson, and Janet Marquis (2001). Longitudinal Change in Language Production: Effects of Aging and Dementia on Grammatical Complexity and Propositional Content. Psychology and Aging 16(4): 600-614.
Briefly, it is a study of the language complexity of a few dozen older adults, starting ages 65 to 75, over a period of up to 15 years. Most adults entered and exited the study at different times, but they were all quite similar in one striking respect, which is shown below. It's aptly named a "spaghetti plot," but it's easily enough read when you understand the organizing principle. Each line represents an individual subject. The y-axis maps grammatical complexity, and the x-axis shows the age of the adult at each observation. (Observations were done at 6-month intervals.)
Note the precipitous drop in performance at 74 years. This is not due to any experimental error. It is not the case, for example, that whoever was measuring grammatical complexity changed jobs and a new person started the work. The x-axis is coded by age, not by time, so if subject 3 was 65 when the study started, while subject 18 was 72, they would have reached age 74 and had their measurements taken seven years apart, but they still experienced similar drops in performance. It's really quite terrifying how uniform the results are. I haven't read much work by Susan Kemper, but someone else in class mentioned that Kemper is known (at least by her) as that author who writes really scary articles about aging.
This paper has been niggling at the back of my mind for quite a while now, and so it was with a certain amount of surprise that I read this week's essay in the back of the NYTimes book review, in which a 73-year old author, Gail Godwin, describes her own experience with the decline of her writing abilities---or more accurately, a decline of lexical access:
Kemper, Susan, Marilyn Thompson, and Janet Marquis (2001). Longitudinal Change in Language Production: Effects of Aging and Dementia on Grammatical Complexity and Propositional Content. Psychology and Aging 16(4): 600-614.
Briefly, it is a study of the language complexity of a few dozen older adults, starting ages 65 to 75, over a period of up to 15 years. Most adults entered and exited the study at different times, but they were all quite similar in one striking respect, which is shown below. It's aptly named a "spaghetti plot," but it's easily enough read when you understand the organizing principle. Each line represents an individual subject. The y-axis maps grammatical complexity, and the x-axis shows the age of the adult at each observation. (Observations were done at 6-month intervals.)
Note the precipitous drop in performance at 74 years. This is not due to any experimental error. It is not the case, for example, that whoever was measuring grammatical complexity changed jobs and a new person started the work. The x-axis is coded by age, not by time, so if subject 3 was 65 when the study started, while subject 18 was 72, they would have reached age 74 and had their measurements taken seven years apart, but they still experienced similar drops in performance. It's really quite terrifying how uniform the results are. I haven't read much work by Susan Kemper, but someone else in class mentioned that Kemper is known (at least by her) as that author who writes really scary articles about aging.
This paper has been niggling at the back of my mind for quite a while now, and so it was with a certain amount of surprise that I read this week's essay in the back of the NYTimes book review, in which a 73-year old author, Gail Godwin, describes her own experience with the decline of her writing abilities---or more accurately, a decline of lexical access:
Inevitable for the old writer is the slowdown of word retrieval. You pause over the keyboard and summon in vain a word you need. This happens oftener and oftener, until you find your jotting pad crammed with thesaurus numbers (74.17, 658.11, 215.22, 236.2). All it once took was the slightest tug at the bell for the vigorous servant, accompanied by backup synonyms, to report for duty. Now you wait, and this waiting offers a variety of responses. You can rail at your “senior moment” like those tiresome people who bring a conversation to a halt because they can’t remember the name of a place or person. You can, of course, resort to your ragged thesaurus, unless your moment is so dire you can’t even remember any words for the concept you’re trying to describe. You can do without the word and perhaps realize how little you needed it, especially if it happened to be an adjective or an adverb. Or you can leave a blank, to be filled in later.
The phenomenon described here is known in psycholinguistics as "tip-of-the-tongue" states (or TOTs). Everyone knows them, but psycholinguists love them, not least because they are the most salient evidence for a separation of form and meaning in whatever part of our brain processes language. Many experiments, which I imagine are maddening for the subjects, work to induce precisely those states, and yield quite interesting results about the kinds of words whose retrieval is most likely to induce a TOT, and how much and what kind of information about those words is still available.
Godwin's discussion of this effect, however, almost convinces me that the decline of lexical retrieval is not a barrier to writing, and might even serve as a kind of internal editor:
Godwin's discussion of this effect, however, almost convinces me that the decline of lexical retrieval is not a barrier to writing, and might even serve as a kind of internal editor:
For me, a consolation prize of word delay has been an increased intolerance for the threadbare phrase. I don’t want anyone on my pages to “burst into tears” or “just perceptibly” do anything, ever again. Better to take a break and ask: “What exactly do I want to say here? How does this really look?” I’ll ask myself, “How do you describe the way an old couple walk that shows they have been walking together for decades?” That in itself may turn out to be the best description.
However, when I return to Kemper's article, I see that, in fact, two separate correlates of language ability were measured. One is grammatical complexity, but the decline in lexical access described by Godwin is more properly the domain of a measure called "propositional content," whose development over time is shown on the spaghetti plot below:
As you can see, the decline in propositional density is far more limited, and has no sudden drop-off the way grammatical complexity does. Whatever Godwin is experiencing, it is probably quite minor compared to the changes in grammatical complexity that characterize the language of older adults. And remember--she is only 73 years old. It's possible that the real decline in her writing hasn't even started yet.
Those have been my thoughts this morning, and they are a bit grim. I would therefore like to leave you with a more amusing story about language usage in younger adults--specifically, Mr. Philena's high school students. It is coming up to the end of the semester, so they know his ways pretty well now. Even in his algebra classes, which contain 9-12th graders who often can't even add single digit numbers and are in algebra simply because it's the lowest-level accredited class a high school can offer without having its state rating suffer--even in that class, where students are often withdrawn and uncooperative, some of the people know him and appreciate his work. Last week, some such students tried to help him keep order.
A rowdy student had just let loose with a slew of cursing and rough language, although "let loose" is perhaps not the best description, because it implies that hitherto the speaker had been holding it in, which, to hear Mr. Philena describe it, they never trouble themselves to do. One of Mr. Philena's defenders, knowing his sensitivity to such speech, decided to step in. "Hey, now!" he said, "No profound language in class!" Mr. Philena, who in fact values profound language in class, asked him if that was the word he wanted to use. Another student decided it wasn't, and volunteered, "You mean no prophetic language in class!"
As you can see, the decline in propositional density is far more limited, and has no sudden drop-off the way grammatical complexity does. Whatever Godwin is experiencing, it is probably quite minor compared to the changes in grammatical complexity that characterize the language of older adults. And remember--she is only 73 years old. It's possible that the real decline in her writing hasn't even started yet.
Those have been my thoughts this morning, and they are a bit grim. I would therefore like to leave you with a more amusing story about language usage in younger adults--specifically, Mr. Philena's high school students. It is coming up to the end of the semester, so they know his ways pretty well now. Even in his algebra classes, which contain 9-12th graders who often can't even add single digit numbers and are in algebra simply because it's the lowest-level accredited class a high school can offer without having its state rating suffer--even in that class, where students are often withdrawn and uncooperative, some of the people know him and appreciate his work. Last week, some such students tried to help him keep order.
A rowdy student had just let loose with a slew of cursing and rough language, although "let loose" is perhaps not the best description, because it implies that hitherto the speaker had been holding it in, which, to hear Mr. Philena describe it, they never trouble themselves to do. One of Mr. Philena's defenders, knowing his sensitivity to such speech, decided to step in. "Hey, now!" he said, "No profound language in class!" Mr. Philena, who in fact values profound language in class, asked him if that was the word he wanted to use. Another student decided it wasn't, and volunteered, "You mean no prophetic language in class!"