Aspects of written language production over adult life.

Abstract

Self-descriptions written by adults were analyzed to explore the effects of age, gender, vocabulary, nonverbal intelligence, and educational-occupational status on lexical aspects of language and grammatical complexity. Multivariate analyses indicated that, after controlling for other background variables, age had a significant effect on vocabulary diversity, sentence complexity, subordinating conjunctions, and possibly sentence length. Four variables--word output, word length, long words, and readability--were affected mainly by vocabulary and educational-occupational status. An unexpected and small but significant gender difference in the readability of the descriptions was observed across all age groups.

The influence of various factors on the performance of repetition tests in adults with cochlear implants

“…Individual linguistic knowledge, education level and use of semantic rules can have a significant impact on some tests, such as speech perception testing in patients with CI. Language abilities, even among hearing individuals, can vary depending on gender, age and education level, and this in turn may affect vocabulary, sentence complexity, subordinating conjunctions and possibly sentence length [9]. Therefore, to accurately evaluate the speech perception of patients with CI, the use of a standardized evaluation tool is necessary.…”

A CHC Theory-Based Analysis of Age Differences on Cognitive Abilities and Academic Skills at Ages 22 to 90 Years

“…Is there a significant Age × Gender interaction in any or all of these analyses? In previous investigations, Age × Gender interactions have tended to be nonsignificant when they have occasionally been studied (e.g., Bromley, 1991), but relatively little is known about whether men and women are the same or different in the mean scores they earn on measures of Gq or Grw between young adulthood and old age.…”

“…The matrices tasks, including the Matrix Reasoning subtest added to the third edition of the WAIS (WAIS-III; Wechsler, 1997), showed mean scores that declined substantially with age from the early 20s to late 80s, using educationadjusted cross-sectional samples (A. S. Kaufman, 2000;Wang & Kaufman, 1993); the WJ-R cluster demonstrated the classic pattern of substantial decline from ages 20 to 75 based on McArdle et al's (2002) use of the latent growth technique and longitudinal data. Other studies by Horn (1985), his colleagues (Horn & Donaldson, 1980;Horn & Hofer, 1992), and other researchers (e.g., Babcock, 1994;Beier & Ackerman, 2005;Bromley, 1991;Finkel, Reynolds, McArdle, Gatz, & Pederson, 2003;Wahlin, MacDonald, deFrias, Nilsson, & Dixon, 2006) have featured fairly pure measures of Gf such as matrices, letter series, number series, figure logic, card sorting, and figure classification. These studies consistently identified characteristic patterns of Gf decline, although the samples were invariably smaller, less stratified, and covered a smaller portion of the adult life span than studies such as the ones cited (e.g., McArdle et al, 2002) that utilized large, stratified samples of adults across the broad adult lifespan.…”

“…Most studies indicate that mean scores on reading comprehension tests and the skills associated with written expression decline with age, and some suggest an age-related decline for math. Yet few studies have used carefully selected age groups that systematically span the range from young adulthood to old age, and those that have done so are limited in their contributions to the literature: McArdle et al's (2002) longitudinal study of the WJ-R tasks merged Grw-Reading and Grw-Writing into a single variable (preventing understanding of each one separately) and extended the analysis only to age 75; McGrew et al (2006), studying WJ III tasks with large cross-sectional samples that spanned a wide age range, failed to control for educational attainment; A. S. used reliable, valid, and well-normed subtests (like the WJ tasks), but their measures focused on functionaladaptive reading and math, unlike the comprehensive measures of Gq and Grw in the WJ-R and WJ III; the Nun longitudinal study (Kemper et al, 2001) and Bromley's (1991) crosssectional study used measures of writing ability (autobiographies and self-reports) of unknown reliability and validity; and the Iowa Department of Education (1998) study had small samples of the older age groups and did not control for educational attainment.…”

“…The decline was slightly greater for the nuns who did not meet the dementia criteria and for grammatical complexity than idea density. Bromley's (1991) cross-sectional investigation included 240 adults between the ages of 20 and 86 years. The participants, grouped by age into six subsamples that ranged in mean age from 25.6 to 74.6, wrote selfdescriptions that were analyzed for a variety of aspects of written expression.…”