Rabaglia Cristina D, Salthouse Timothy A
Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA.
Lang Cogn Process. 2011 Dec 1;26(10). doi: 10.1080/01690965.2010.507489.
Although it is often claimed that verbal abilities are relatively well maintained across the adult lifespan, certain aspects of language production have been found to exhibit cross-sectional differences and longitudinal declines. In the current project age-related differences in controlled and naturalistic elicited language production tasks were examined within the context of a reference battery of cognitive abilities in a moderately large sample of individuals aged 18-90. The results provide support for age-related increases in lexical sophistication and diversity at the discourse level, and declines in grammatical complexity in controlled and naturalistic contexts. Further, age-related decreases in facility with complex grammatical constructions in controlled sentence production were statistically independent of the cognitive abilities assessed in this project.
尽管人们常称语言能力在成年人的整个生命周期中相对保持良好，但语言产出的某些方面已被发现存在横断面差异和纵向衰退。在当前项目中，在一个年龄跨度为18至90岁的适度大样本个体中，结合一系列认知能力测试，研究了在受控和自然引发的语言产出任务中与年龄相关的差异。结果支持了在语篇层面词汇复杂性和多样性随年龄增长而增加，以及在受控和自然语境中语法复杂性下降的观点。此外，在受控句子产出中，与复杂语法结构运用能力的年龄相关下降在统计学上独立于本项目中评估的认知能力。
