title: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Liverpool, England.
authors.forename: D B
authors.initials: DB
authors.lastname: Bromley
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over / Q000523:psychology; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D003210:Concept Formation; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007360:Intelligence; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010553:Personality Development; D012649:Self Concept; D012660:Semantics; D014825:Vocabulary; D014956:Writing