Communication and Aging
How do our communicative abilities change over the adult lifespan? Unlike our perceptual acuity, memory, and reaction time, our language ability has often been described as being comparatively stable as we age. Is this actually the case? And how could this be, given that communication is supported by the interplay of numerous cognitive and perceptual abilities that, on their own, show patterns of age-related decline? We explore these questions using experimental methodologies that allow us to measure real-time processing in naturalistic contexts. This work is made possible by the wonderful community volunteers who make up our Senior Participant Database.
Representative studies:
Saryazdi, R., Nuque, J., & Chambers, C.G., (2022). Linguistic redundancy and its effects on younger and older adults’ real-time comprehension and memory. Cognitive Science.
Saryazdi, R., Nuque, J., & Chambers, C. G. (2022). Pragmatic inferences in aging and human robot communication. Cognition.
Saryazdi, R., DeSantis, D., Johnson, E.K., & Chambers, C. G. (2021). The use of disfluency cues in spoken language processing: Insights from aging. Psychology and Aging, 38, 928-924.
Saryazdi, R., Bannon, J., & Chambers C.G. (2019) Age-related differences in referential production: A multiple-measures study. Psychology and Aging, 34, 791-804.
Baltaretu, A., & Chambers, C.G. (2018). When criminals blow up ... balloons. Associative and combinatorial information in the generation of on-line predictions. Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 124-129). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
Mozuraitis, M., Chambers, C.G., & Daneman, M. (2013). Younger and older adults' use of verb aspect and world knowledge in the online interpretation of discourse. Discourse Processes, 50, 1-22.
Ben-David, B., Chambers, C.G., Daneman, M., Pichora-Fuller, M.K., Reingold, E., & Schneider, B.A. (2011). Effects of aging and noise on real-time spoken word recognition: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 54, 243-262.