Index
Language processes in healthy and language impaired older people
Who are ‘older people’?
Demographic information
Normal Ageing
Spectrum of change - from normal to pathological ageing - from a narrower range of variation in the young elderly to a wide range of variation in the old elderly - from single cause communication disorders to multiple causation
Factors in ageing communication
Misconceptions about Ageing
Research shows
Methodological issues:
Speech and language therapists need:
Language processes in:
Normal ageing Alzheimer’s disease
Language processing in the normally ageing population
What does research tell us about language comprehension?
Sentence processing
Information coded in complex grammatical structures is more difficult to process
Recall from paragraphs may decrease, depending on the type of information
Older people make increased use of contextual information
Tentative conclusion:
What does research tell us about language production?
Clause structure
Phrase structure
Coordination/Subordination
Are errors common in the language of older people?
Common error types
Language monitoring and repair
Complex Language structures:
Continued…
Discourse
Tentative conclusion:
Alzheimer’s disease: A key research question
Warrington & Shallice (1979) set up 4 criteria to differentiate an access deficit from a degraded store deficit:
Consistency
Priming
Consistency
Priming
Implications for intervention
So………..