Changing Minds: How Aging Affects Language and How Language Affects Aging - Hardcover

Kreuz, Roger; Roberts, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262042592 ISBN 13: 9780262042598

Publisher: The MIT Press, 2019

Synopsis

Why language ability remains resilient and how it shapes our lives.

We acquire our native language, seemingly without effort, in infancy and early childhood. Language is our constant companion throughout our lifetime, even as we age. Indeed, compared with other aspects of cognition, language seems to be fairly resilient through the process of aging. In Changing Minds, Roger Kreuz and Richard Roberts examine how aging affects language―and how language affects aging.

Kreuz and Roberts report that what appear to be changes in an older person's language ability are actually produced by declines in such other cognitive processes as memory and perception. Some language abilities, including vocabulary size and writing ability, may even improve with age. And certain language activities―including reading fiction and engaging in conversation―may even help us live fuller and healthier lives.

Kreuz and Roberts explain the cognitive processes underlying our language ability, exploring in particular how changes in these processes lead to changes in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. They consider, among other things, the inability to produce a word that's on the tip of your tongue―and suggest that the increasing incidence of this with age may be the result of a surfeit of world knowledge. For example, older people can be better storytellers, and (something to remember at a family reunion) their perceived tendency toward off-topic verbosity may actually reflect communicative goals.

About this title

About the Author

Roger Kreuz is Associate Dean and Director of Graduate Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Psychology at the University of Memphis. He is the coauthor (with Richard Roberts) of Becoming Fluent: How Cognitive Science Can Help Adults Learn a Foreign Language,Getting Through: The Pleasures and Perils of Cross-Cultural Communication, and Changing Minds: How Aging Affects Language and How Language Affects Aging (all published by the MIT Press).

Richard Roberts is a Foreign Service Officer currently serving as the Public Affairs Officer at the US Consulate General in Okinawa, Japan. He is the coauthor (with Roger Kreuz) of of Becoming Fluent: How Cognitive Science Can Help Adults Learn a Foreign Language and Getting Through: The Pleasures and Perils of Cross-Cultural Communication, both published by the MIT Press.

Review

“From the first page, I found myself reading this book with the same care and enthusiasm as I would a novel. It is a well-researched, well-crafted, and utterly fascinating exploration into how we use words and how language becomes us as we age. It goes beyond the structure of language and language acquisition and change and instead gives a rich cultural context necessary to appreciate the complexity of language.”

―Kate de Medeiros, O'Toole Family Professor, Scripps Gerontology Center, Miami University, Ohio

Edition details

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0262042592
• ISBN 13: 9780262042598
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288