Moscoso Del Prado Martín Fermín
University of California, Santa Barbara.
Cogn Sci. 2017 May;41(4):950-975. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12367. Epub 2016 Mar 22.
Understanding the changes in our language abilities along the lifespan is a crucial step for understanding the aging process both in normal and in abnormal circumstances. Besides controlled experimental tasks, it is equally crucial to investigate language in unconstrained conversation. I present an information-theoretical analysis of a corpus of dyadic conversations investigating how the richness of the vocabulary, the word-internal structure (inflectional morphology), and the syntax of the utterances evolves as a function of the speaker's age and sex. Although vocabulary diversity increases throughout the lifetime, grammatical diversities follow a different pattern, which also differs between women and men. Women use increasingly diverse syntactic structures at least up to their late fifties, and they do not deteriorate in terms of fluency through their lifespan. However, from age 45 onward, men exhibit a decrease in the diversity of the syntactic structures they use, coupled with an increased number of speech disfluencies.
了解我们语言能力在整个生命周期中的变化，是理解正常和异常情况下衰老过程的关键一步。除了控制性实验任务外，在无约束对话中研究语言同样至关重要。我对一组二元对话语料库进行了信息理论分析，研究词汇丰富度、词内结构（屈折形态学）以及话语的句法如何随着说话者的年龄和性别而演变。尽管词汇多样性在一生中不断增加，但语法多样性呈现出不同的模式，且男女之间也存在差异。女性至少在五十多岁后期使用越来越多样化的句法结构，并且在整个生命周期中流利度不会下降。然而，从45岁起，男性使用的句法结构多样性减少，同时言语不流畅性增加。
