A View of Age-Related Changes in Language Function

The purpose of this report is to describe an investigation of possible aging effects on neurolinguistic task performance in a study of the effects of age-related dementing illness on communication. Ten healthy normal individuals, controlled for intelligence and education, from each decade of life from the third to the eighth were given the following five neurolinguistic measures: Sentence Correction task, Verbal Description Test, Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised, Sentence Disambiguation task, and Pragmatics task. Frequency distributions of subject performance scores were developed for each measure and, where appropriate, analysis of variance was used to evaluate aging effects. Results of the study demonstrate that age-related decline in linguistic competency cannot be assumed and age effects, when present, may not take the form of an across-the-decades decline.