socialcontactandcommunicativecompetenceintheoldest.docVIP

Social Contact and Communicative Competence in the Oldest Old Deborah Keller-Cohen, Amanda Toler, Diane Miller, Katherine Fiori, and Deborah Bybee University of Michigan Paper to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association, Honolulu, July 28, 2004 Introduction Despite the fact that the oldest old are the fastest growing segment of the population, the relationships among language, cognition and social engagement have not been examined in this age group. Indeed even the existing literature on oral language and aging has largely focused on adults under the age of 85. Change in the language of the elderly is typically attributed to neuro-cognitive decline (Au et al, 1995; Kemper et al,2001). Memory, attention, inhibition and processing speed have all been thought to play a role in how language changes with age. However these changes have varied across areas of linguistic knowledge. For example, vocabulary knowledge has been found to improve whereas word retrieval is compromised with aging (Au, 1995); (S. S. Kemper, A., 2001); (Borod, 1980). A decline in sentence complexity has been reported in statements of elderly adults but the same statements were judged to be more interesting than those by younger speakers(S. Kemper, Kynette, D., Rash, S., OBrien, K., Sprott, R., 1989). Cognitive effects on communicative skills have not been uniform, i.e. there is no single dynamic that captures the relation of cognition to communication. What role social contact plays in the maintenance of communicative skills remains largely unexplored. It seems likely that social contact would impact the maintenance of language skills since evidence exists that social engagement is protective against cognitive decline (Seeman et al, 2001; Zunzunegui et al. (2003). The present investigation, a pilot study, focuses on social contact as well as some aspects of social networks and their relation to language and cognition in the old