Volume 5, Issue s2 - Special Issue: Language and Aging Research / Issue Editors: Annette Gerstenberg and Camilla Lindholm

Our introduction to the special collection gives an overview of the research projects which were originally presented at the third CLARe network conference. We group the research under four cross-sectional topics that unite the different contributions: the data used in the research, the theoretical frameworks, the languages and varieties which are represented and the situational contexts which are examined. These projects represent the current state of research in this field and allows the reader to orient themselves within this diverse field but also leaves many questions open and provides impetus for future lines of research. The interaction and collaboration between diverse disciplines is the central aspect which unites all contributions to the special collection.

This paper reviews theoretical and methodological advances and issues in lifespan research and discusses how the issues at stake are addressed in an ongoing research project. Summarizing the state of the art, we conclude that next to nothing is known about lifespan changes affecting syntactic or grammaticalizing constructions that goes beyond exploratory or anecdotal evidence. The Mind-Bending Grammars project, which examines the adaptive powers of adult cognition and constraints on these powers, aspires to make headway in this area. In this paper, we introduce some of the major goals of the project and present a new large-scale longitudinal corpus of 50 adults that was established to study grammatical change across the lifespan. Particular attention is paid to the constraints on the adoption of novel grammatical patterns in the aging mind. Taking be going to as a case study, we present evidence that (highly educated) healthy monolingual speakers continue to participate in grammatical innovations across the lifespan.

The BIT, BING, BET, BAT, BAN, BOOK, and BUT vowels of ten Utah English speakers (born 1883–1928) were analyzed over the course of several decades of their adult lives. Most speakers participated in the Western Vowel System by lowering BIT and BET, retracting BAT, and raising BAN, with some fronting BOOK and BUT. Speakers generally did not exhibit monotonic change across the years from expected positions for BET, BAT, and BAN, and for the most part for BOOK and BUT; however, most speakers showed change with regard to BIT, though speakers differed from each other on the direction of change. Even for those vowels with no consistent direction of intraindividual change, however, in many cases speakers were inconsistent in their production from year to year. Further, speakers’ envelopes of variation were different for various vowels, with the widest range of intraindividual variation in BET and BAT, less variation in BAN and BUT, and little in BIT and BOOK. It is suggested that the envelope of variation is at least as much as an important issue for studies of linguistic behavior across adulthood as any actual shift in linguistic behavior across real time.

The relationship between community-wide change and patterns of variation and change within the individual is one of the cornerstones of variationist theorising. But while sociolinguistic theory makes clear and testable predictions regarding the use of stable vernacular features across the life-span of the individual, we lack real-time evidence on the age-graded nature of stable variability. Indeed, whereas apparent time research highlights the diachronic stability of (ing), only two research projects have explored its use within the individual speaker. Both report on pre-adult speakers. Our research expands the window of analysis by adding a later age-bracket to the investigation of age-graded variability. We consider the variable realisation of (ing) in a group of individuals between early adulthood and retirement.

The study asked whether there are age-related differences in the Implicit Causality values (IC-values) of transitive verbs in younger and older adults. The results are expected to support either linguistic accounts or world-knowledge accounts of the origin of Implicit Causality. Using the traditional sentence-completion task (John VERBs Mary, because …) 124 verbs were investigated in a group of students around age 23 and in a group of older people around age 81. Compared to the students, the older people produced higher proportions of Object-reference with verbs showing Subject-reference in general and higher Subject-reference with verbs showing Object-reference in general. Verb-class analysis in terms of semantic role patterns showed that the IC-values of SE-verbs and ES-verbs were less different in the two groups than those of SE-AP-verbs, AP-verbs, and APpres-verbs. The differences in the two latter classes are significant. The relatively broad similarity in the IC-values of the two age groups supports linguistic accounts of the origin of IC-values. The observed differences, however, point to variation in the perspective on interpersonal events in younger and older adults. It is hypothesized that the latter observation reflects an impact of world knowledge on IC-values in that the social life situations of younger and older adults shape expectations regarding who is causing an interpersonal event somewhat differently in the two age groups.

We used self-paced reading to examine whether stereotypical associations of verbs with women or men as prototypical agents (e.g. the craftsman knits a sweater ) are activated during sentence processing in dementia patients and healthy older adults. Effects of stereotypical knowledge on language processing have frequently been observed in young adults, but little is known about age-related changes in the activation and integration of stereotypical information. While syntactic processing may remain intact, semantic capacities are often affected in dementia. Since inferences based on gender stereotypes draw on social and world knowledge, access to stereotype information may also be affected in dementia patients. Results from dementia patients (n = 9, average age 86.6) and healthy older adults (n = 14, average age 79.5) showed slower reading times and less accuracy in comprehension scores for dementia patients compared to the control group. While activation of stereotypical associations of verbs was visible in both groups, they differed with respect to the time-course of processing. The effect of stereotypes on comprehension accuracy was visible for healthy adults only. The evidence from reading times suggests that older adults with and without dementia engage stereotypical inferences during reading, which is in line with research on young adults.

In addition to memory loss, progressive deterioration of speech and language skills is among the main symptoms at the onset of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) as well as in mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Detailed interview analyses demonstrated early symptoms years before the onset of AD/MCI. Automatic speech processing could be a promising approach to identifying underlying mechanisms in larger studies or even support diagnostics. Perplexity as a measure of predictability of text could be a sensitive indicator of cognitive deterioration. Therefore, voice recordings from the Interdisciplinary Longitudinal Study on Adult Development and Aging were analyzed with regard to neuropsychological parameters in participants that develop MCI/AD or remain cognitively healthy. Preliminary results indicate that perplexity predicts severity of cognitive deficits and information processing speed obtained 10–12 years later in participants who developed MCI/AD in contrast to those who stayed healthy. Findings support the heuristic value of research on the diagnostic potential of automatic speech processing.

This paper examines the use of self-repairs in ascribing old-age categorisations to self and others in casual interactions among friends. Membership categorisation analysis and conversation analysis are employed to analyse self-recorded, everyday conversations of a group of older Greek Cypriot women with a long interactional history. The interactional organisation of old-age labels, and specifically instances of self-repair of age categorisations, reveal that members orient to old-age categories as hierarchically positioned and inference-rich. Members make relevant a very intricate set of expectations of who can be categorised by whom, with what specific age category term and at which context, partly because other-categorisations can also implicate one’s self-categorisation as old. Sequential and categorisation analyses provide a powerful analytical toolkit for the investigation of participants’ local system of self- and other-ascription of explicit -but also implicit- age identities. It is shown that the combination of membership categorisation analysis and conversation analysis can be extended beyond the analysis of turn-generating categories and can be instrumental in analysing flexible, context-shaped and agentively managed category identifications that also have currency beyond the local interactional occasion.

In the fifty years since Robert Butler coined the term, ageism remains one of the most widely-experienced forms of discrimination in Europe. Some forms of ageism seem overt and easy-to-identify; in many cases, though, it is invisible and deeply rooted in everyday life. This applies, too, to ageism-in-interaction, which, as I argue in this paper, can be very subtle, deeply embedded in a web of routines and expectations generated over a longer interactional history. I illustrate this embeddedness of ageism-in-interaction by focussing, as a case-study, on an encounter in a hair-salon between an 83-year-old woman and her stylist, aspects of which we might initially be tempted to attribute to the stylist’s orientations to the client’s (older) age. However, as I show, closer scrutiny of the emergent interaction, combined with progressive widening of the analysis to encompass data outside this focal exchange, suggests more nuanced understandings of what is going on. As I also aim to show, the nose-to-data attention to the emergent interactions in this case-study, informed by conversation analysis and combined with wider ethnographic knowledge, is the tool-kit we need to reveal the less visible instances of ageism-in-interaction.

In older Japanese women’s conversational interactions associated with psychologically challenging conditions such as experiences of illness and a husband’s death, there are segments told from a quotidian (or ordinary) perspective, i.e. a perspective that is affectively incongruous with the situation. With this quotidian (re)framing of their “painful” experiences, the participants collaboratively construct a quotidian positioning and stance, rather than the position that may be socially or contextually expected in the event or situation described in the conversation. This paper elaborates on the composition and social meaning of quotidian stance, referring to concepts such as frames, positioning, and stancetaking. The important psychological and social aspects of quotidian stancetaking in verbal interaction will be highlighted. One is that the performance of being quotidian in the context of retelling “painful” stories can index participants’ psychological resilience in difficult and extraordinary situations. This can help the participants regain normality in abnormal situations. Another is that such quotidian performance against the backdrop of the socially-held negative stereotypes of older people can index defiance to such sociocultural expectations.

The research presented in this paper is based on audio-recordings from a Japanese care facility. I focus on interactional tempo differences between residents and staff. The analysis concentrates on two interrelated phenomena that can be taken as indications of hurriedness on the part of the care workers: overlaps and turn repetitions. Presenting examples for each of the two, I also show that the staff’s hurried performance does not necessarily result in a quicker completion of the care tasks. I go on to reflect on the staff’s likely reasons for doing “being in a hurry,” arguing that apart from real time pressures, the mere display of hurriedness can become an end in itself.

Recent studies documenting the real-time details of human interactions have revealed the way in which artefacts in the immediate physical surround facilitate the display and demonstration of knowledge. The museum setting in which physically present objects prompt and support visitor displays of knowledge is particularly well-suited for individuals managing symptoms related to memory loss as a result of dementia, especially of the Alzheimer’s type. In this paper, we explore question-answer sequences taken from three hour-long guided sessions within an art gallery program involving museum guides who were specially trained to work with visitors with dementia. We investigate representative sequences 1) in which visitors exercise interactional control by posing questions to guides that relate to the visitors’ own interests and 2) in which guides pose questions to visitors regarding topics that relate to the visitors’ personal lives. We argue that these two discursive practices promote interactional meaningfulness, in that the former pattern affords the visitors interactional agency, while the latter pattern allows them to display their epistemic authority. Finally, we consider how insights from this therapeutic model may be translated from the museum to the home setting.

The article identifies and describes conversational practices used by persons with dementia and their interlocutors to account for the former’s lack of knowledge in cases where information about their personal experiences is made relevant and expectable at a specific point in a conversation. First, they may seek to normalize the lack of knowledge by claiming that it would be difficult for anyone to know or remember the information in question. Second, they may exceptionalize it by claiming that their cognitive or communicative impairment incidentally and temporarily disables them from accessing the information. Finally, they may justify their failure to provide information by claiming that it is not important, relevant or expectable that they should know. Such accounts dissociate the social character from the forgetfulness and thus constitute an attempt to avoid the loss of face associated with not remembering personal experiences. By specifying these conversational accounting practices, the study thus adds to existing knowledge on how participants handle the social sensitivity of typical dementia symptoms.

This article analyses how caregivers use affective touch as a resource to facilitate interaction. Through touch, caregivers construct positive socio-emotional relationships with their residents. The analysis of micro-level interaction is based on an interactional sociolinguistic framework, and reveals how caregivers display affection and intimacy while assisting the residents in everyday situations in a care home. All of the examples involve touching a person’s shoulder, stroking or giving half-embraces, typical resources used to construct affiliation between caregivers and residents. This article illustrates how affective touch facilitates interaction by regulating participation and calming down residents, by mitigating the controlling aspect of caring, and by fostering a positive interpersonal relationship. The care situations presented in this article contain crucial pauses within talk that are used to construct a peaceful atmosphere. During these crucial moments, embodied action effectively indicates an orientation to listening and establishes a presence to accomplish the actions in that situational talk. This analysis contributes to the studies on embodied interaction and on interpersonal relationships in care for older adults. I would like to thank Camilla Lindholm, an anonymous reviewer as well as Maria Frick and Hanna Lappalainen for valuable comments on the earlier versions of this article.