Language & Aging

The University of Southern California has long been known as an outstanding place to study aging and dementia. When I was a professor at USC, I used the opportunity to be amidst these great resources and collaborators to study the effects of aging and Alzheimer’s disease on language comprehension and talking.

It’s a complex undertaking, because aging and dementia affect many aspects of our thinking and language use. These changes don’t necessarily occur at the same rate, and because different abilities depend on one another, slowing or decline in one area can affect skills in another area.

For example, the Dagerman et al. (2006) paper uses experiments and computational models to show how the slowed language comprehension of healthy elderly adults affects their abilities to understand ambiguous words in context when reading. Similarly, Almor et al. (1999) investigates the many reasons why patients with Alzheimer’s dementia have a lot of difficulty understanding pronouns like he, she, and them.

These studies help us understand the nature of language, aging and dementia, with the ultimate goal of helping improve the lives of patients and their families.