Susan Kemper

Longitudinal change in language production: effects of aging and dementia on grammatical complexity and propositional content.

Mixed modeling was used to examine longitudinal changes in linguistic ability in healthy older adults and older adults with dementia. Language samples, vocabulary scores, and digit span scores were collected annually from healthy older adults and semiannually from older adults with dementia. The language samples were scored for grammatical complexity and propositional content. For the healthy group, age-related declines in grammatical complexity and propositional content were observed. The declines were most rapid in the mid 70s. For the group with dementia, grammatical complexity and propositional content also declined over time, regardless of age. Rates of decline were uniform across individuals. These analyses reveal how both grammatical complexity and propositional content are related to late-life changes in cognition in healthy older adults aswell as those with dementia. Alzheimers disease accelerates this decline, regardless of age.

Automatic measurement of propositional idea density from part-of-speech tagging

The Computerized Propositional Idea Density Rater (CPIDR, pronounced “spider”) is a computer program that determines the propositional idea density (P-density) of an English text automatically on the basis of partof-speech tags. The key idea is that propositions correspond roughly to verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions. After tagging the parts of speech using MontyLingua (Liu, 2004), CPIDR applies numerous rules to adjust the count, such as combining auxiliary verbs with the main verb. A “speech mode” is provided in which CPIDR rejects repetitions and a wider range of fillers. CPIDR is a user-friendly Windows .NET application distributed as open-source freeware under GPL. Tested against human raters, it agrees with the consensus of two human raters better than the team of five raters agree with each other [r(80) = .97 vs. r(10) = .82, respectively].

Elderspeak: Speech accommodations to older adults

Abstract Ten service providers and 10 caregivers were recorded as they spoke to groups of younger or older adults. Ten-minute speech samples were analyzed for the occurrence of “elderspeak,” systematic speech accommodations directed towards older adults, using measures of syntactic complexity, verbal fluency, prepositional content, lexical choice, discourse organization, speech rate, and other stylistic markers. Both the caregivers and service providers adjusted how they spoke to different audiences: They reduced the length and complexity of their utterances, produced more lexical fillers and sentence fragments, used fewer long words of three or more syllables, more utterances per turn and per topic, and more repetitions when addressing older adults. They also spoke more slowly and paused longer when addressing older audiences. Prepositional content, type-token ratios, diminutives and tag questions, however, did not vary with audience. These findings confirm prior subjective accounts of the use of an “eld...

Imitation of complex syntactic constructions by elderly adults

Elderly adults (70 to 89 years) and young adults (30 to 49 years) were asked to imitate complex sentences involving embedded gerunds, wh -clauses, that -clauses, and relative clauses. The young adults were able to imitate accurately or correctly paraphrase the sentences regardless of the length, position, or type of embedded clause. The elderly adults could accurately imitate or paraphrase short constructions. The elderly adults were unable to imitate or paraphrase correctly long constructions, especially those in which the embedded clause was sentence-initial. The pattern of results demonstrates an age-related decline in syntactic processing abilities due, perhaps, to the increased processing demands of the long or sentence-initial constructions.

Language decline across the life span: findings from the Nun study

The present study examines language samples from the Nun Study. Measures of grammatical complexity and idea density were obtained from autobiographies written over a 60-year span. Participants who had met criteria for dementia were contrasted with those who did not. Grammatical complexity initially averaged 4.78 (on a 0-to-7-point scale) for participants who did not meet criteria for dementia and declined .04 units per year; grammatical complexity for participants who met criteria for dementia initially averaged 3.86 and declined .03 units per year. Idea density averaged 5.35 propositions per 10 words initially for participants who did not meet criteria for dementia and declined an average of .03 units per year, whereas idea density averaged 4.34 propositions per 10 words initially for participants who met criteria for dementia and declined .02 units per year. Adult experiences, in general, did not moderate these declines.

Exploring Interventions to Reduce Cognitive Decline in Aging

As the population ages, risks for cognitive decline threaten independence and quality of life for older adults and present challenges to the health care system. Nurses are in a unique position to advise older adults about cognitive health promotion and to develop interventions that optimize cognition in older adults. A literature review was conducted to provide nurses in mental health and geriatric care with an overview of research related to the promotion of successful cognitive aging for older adults. Research evaluating cognitively stimulating lifestyles and the effects on cognitive function in older adults of interventions targeting cognitive training, physical activity, social engagement, and nutrition were reviewed. Overall research findings support positive effects of cognitive and physical activity, social engagement, and therapeutic nutrition in optimizing cognitive aging. However, the strength of the evidence is limited by research designs. Applications for health promotion to optimize cognitive aging and future directions for research are discussed.

Understanding verbal fluency in healthy aging, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease

OBJECTIVE Verbal fluency measures are frequently part of batteries designed to assess executive function (EF), but are also used to assess semantic processing ability or word knowledge. The goal of the present study was to identify the cognitive components underlying fluency performance. METHOD Healthy young and older adults, adults with Parkinsons disease, and adults with Alzheimers disease performed letter, category, and action fluency tests. Performance was assessed in terms of number of items generated, clustering, and the time course of output. A series of neuropsychological assessments were also administered to index verbal ability, working memory, EF, and processing speed as correlates of fluency performance. RESULTS Findings indicated that regardless of the particular performance measure, young adults performed the best and adults with Alzheimers disease performed most poorly, with healthy older adults and adults with Parkinsons disease performing at intermediate levels. The exception was the action fluency task, where adults with Parkinsons disease performed most poorly. The time course of fluency performance was characterized in terms of slope and intercept parameters and related to neuropsychological constructs. Speed of processing was found to be the best predictor of performance, rather than the efficiency of EF or semantic knowledge. CONCLUSIONS Together, these findings demonstrate that the pattern of fluency performance looks generally the same regardless of how performance is measured. In addition, the primary role of processing speed in performance suggests that the use of fluency tasks as measures of EF or verbal ability warrants reexamination.

The Development of Narrative Skills: Explanations and Entertainments

We tell stories to entertain our audience and to explain our actions. Stories transmit cultural and individual traditions, values, and moral codes. They explicate observable actions and events in terms of unobservable goals and motives, thoughts and emotions. Stories manipulate place and time to present temporal and causal sequences that are extraordinary. Storytelling is one of the first uses of language (Halliday, 1975; Keenan, 1974; Weir, 1960) and one of the most skilled (Lord, 1960; Watson-Gegeo & Boggs, 1977). Storytelling and understanding are verbal arts that children gradually master between 2 and 10 years of age. In developing narrative competence, children learn to produce and comprehend causally and temporally structured plots that are organized around a variety of themes and involve a myriad of characters. (1) Froggie goes crash in the water, bumps his head. And he fell in dirt. He cried. Then he bumped his head off. (2-year-old boy, Pitcher & Prelinger, 1963, p. 34) (2) Once there was an alligator who lived in New York City and all the children were his friends and he wouldn’t hurt anybody. And one day he got a note saying, “Mr. Alligator, I hate you.” And Mr. Alligator always kept feeling bad because everybody liked him. But while he was walking through the grocery store he saw little girl writing a note. The note said, “Mr. Alligator, I hate you.” And he asked the little girl why she hated him. The girl said, “Because you’re taking my friends away from me. They always want to play with you.” Mr. Alligator said, “Why don’t you play with me too?” And she said, “My mother doesn’t like alligators and won’t let me. She thinks they’ll bite.” So Mr. Alligator went to the little girl’s house and said to her mother, “I’m not going to bite anybody.” And the little girl’s mother said, “All right, I can see that.” The alligator said, “Good, so everybody else can play with me.” (10-year-old boy, Sutton-Smith, 1981, p. 290)

Language and Aging

In the late 1970s Gillian Cohen surveyed research on the effects of aging on language and concluded that “geriatric psycholinguistics is virtually an unexplored territory” (1979:412). In the decade since she reached this conclusion, psycholinguists, sociolinguists, speech-language pathologists, and cognitive scientists have begun to explore this territory and to map a wide range of age-related changes to language.

Enhancing Communication With Older Adults: Overcoming Elderspeak

Because communication behaviors are difficult to change, practicing speech without elderspeak is helpful in preparing for actual clinical situations. The Communication Enhancement Model describes potential benefits of eliminating elderspeak in speech to older adults. Minimizing the use of elderspeak is hypothesized to reduce stereotype-based messages that older adults are incompetent and dependent. An improved communication environment promotes the cognitive and functional abilities of older adults. Achieving optimal communication environments may contribute to higher levels of well-being for older adults and to increased quality of life. Young adult care providers also may benefit from increased job satisfaction if they relate closely with care recipients.