This text-based course is a transcript of the live seminar, “Language in Normal Aging” presented by Dr. Heather Harris Wright, PhD, CCC-SLP.
>> Heather Harris Wright: I am looking forward to talking with you about language ability as we age. Since covering all of language abilities and changes that occur as we age would be a semester long course, I thought we would focus on the language level where we communicate, the discourse level. We will talk about the macrolinguistic and microlinguistic processes within discourse, the age-related changes at the discourse level, and consider some of the contributing factors to these age-related changes that we should be aware of when we are working with older adults.
Why We Care about the Discourse Level
First of all, a discourse is a naturally occurring form of communication. It involves activation and interaction of multiple interconnected cognitive and linguistic subsystems. We care about this level because it is the level where we communicate. It is where we want to see change in our clients with aphasia and other acquired and urgent communication disorders, and it is where the change is noticed by the patient and their significant others. It is where they notice changes in their language abilities and they notice it in their ability to communicate with others. When loved ones notice changes in their family members who have aphasia, they notice it in their ability to communicate with others, the length of the utterances they produce, and the quality of the lexical choices they produce.
What We Need to Consider with Discourse
There are several components of discourse that we need to consider and to familiarize ourselves with before going into what some of the age-related changes are that we will see. First, the type of discourse we are eliciting from our patients and clients is really critical if we are to look at the changes we are interested in and to document changes in response to treatments. Then we need to consider the discourse processes themselves. What are we measuring? What do we want to see? What changes are we looking for? At what level of the discourse processes are we looking for changes? There are microlinguistic processes and macrolinguistic processes which I will discuss more and the changes we see in these different processes as we age.
