title: Natural and constrained language production as a function of age and cognitive abilities.
abstract: Although it is often claimed that verbal abilities are relatively well maintained across the adult lifespan, certain aspects of language production have been found to exhibit cross-sectional differences and longitudinal declines. In the current project age-related differences in controlled and naturalistic elicited language production tasks were examined within the context of a reference battery of cognitive abilities in a moderately large sample of individuals aged 18-90. The results provide support for age-related increases in lexical sophistication and diversity at the discourse level, and declines in grammatical complexity in controlled and naturalistic contexts. Further, age-related decreases in facility with complex grammatical constructions in controlled sentence production were statistically independent of the cognitive abilities assessed in this project.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Cristina D
authors.initials: CD
authors.lastname: Rabaglia
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA.
authors.forename: Timothy A
authors.initials: TA
authors.lastname: Salthouse
keywords: Ageing; Cognitive abilities; Grammatical complexity