Gerontology Center

LAB	Acknowledgements
Collaborators	Current Projects
Abstracts and Papers	Events

**Click on underlined titles for the abstracts. PDF files are available where indicated.**

Kemper, S., McDowd, J., Metcalf, K., & Liu, C.-J. (2008). Young and older adults’ reading of distracters. Educational Gerontology, 34, 489-502. click here for pdf

Kemper, S., & Liu, C. – J. (2007). Eye movements of young and older adults during reading. Psychology and Aging, 22, 84-94. click here for pdf

Kemper, S., & McDowd, J. (2006). Eye movements of young and older adults while reading with distraction. Psychology and Aging, 21, 32-39. click here for pdf

Kemper, S., & Herman, R. (2006). Age differences in memory load interference effects in syntactic processing. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 61B, P327-323. click here for pdf

Altmann, L.J., & Kemper, S. (2006). Effects of age, animacy, and order of activation on sentence production. Language and Cognitive Processes, 21, 322-354. click here for pdf file

O'Hanlon, L, Kemper, S., & Wilcox, K.A. (2005). Aging, encoding, and word retrieval: Distinguishing phonological and memory processes. Experimental Aging Research, 31, 149-171.

Williams, K., Kemper, S., & Hummert, M.L. (2005). Enhancing communication with older adults: Overcoming elderspeak. Journal of Psychosocial Nursing, 43, 2-6.

Kemper, S., Herman, R.E., Nartowicz, J. (2005). Different effects of dual task demands on the speech of young and older adults. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 12, 340-358. click here for pdf file

Williams, K., Hummert, M. L., & Kemper, S. (2004). Enhancing communication with older adults: Overcoming elderspeak. Journal of Gerontological Nursing, 17-25. click here for pdf

Kemper, S., Herman, R., & Lian, C. (2004). Age differences in sentence production. Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 58B, P220-P224. click here for pdf file

Kemper, S., Crow, A., & Kemtes, K. A. (2004). Eye-fixation patterns of high- and low-span young and older adults: Down the garden path and back again. Psychology and Aging, 19, 157-170. click here for pdf file

Kemper, S., Herman, R.E., Liu, C.J. (2004). Sentence production by younger and older adults in controlled contexts. Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 58B, P220-P224. click here for pdf file

Humphrey, H., Radel, J. S., & Kemper, S. (2004). The Time Course of Metonymic Language Text Processing by Older and Younger Adults. Experimental Aging Research, 30, 75-90.

Mitzner, T., & Kemper, S. (2003). Oral and Written Language in Late Adulthood: Findings from the Nun Study. Experimental Aging Research, 29, 457-474.

Williams, K., Holmes, F., Kemper, S., & Marquis, J. (2003). Written language clues to dementia: An analysis of the letters of King James VI/I. Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 53, P42-P44. click here for pdf file

Williams, K., Kemper, S., & Hummert, M. L. (2003). Improving Nursing Home Communication: An Intervention to Reduce Elderspeak. The Gerontologist, 43, 243-248.

Kemtes, K. A., & Kemper, S. (2001). Cognitive construct mearurement in small samples of young and older adults: An example of verbal working memory. Experimental Aging Research, 27, 167-180.

Kemper, S., Greiner, L., Marquis, J., Prenovost, K., & Mitzner, T. (2001). Language decline across the life span: Findings from the Nun Study. Psychology and Aging, 16, 227-239. click here for pdf file

Kemper, S. & Sumner, A. (2001). The structure of verbal abilities in young and older adults. Psychology and Aging, 16, 312-322. click here for pdf file

O'Hanlon, L., Wilcox, K., & Kemper, S. (2001). Age differences in implicit and explict associative memory: Exploring elaborative processing effects. Experimental Aging Research, 27, 341-360.

Kemper, S., Thompson, M., & Marquis, J. (2001). Longitudinal change in language production: Effects of aging and dementia on grammatical complexity and propositional content. Psychology and Aging, 16, 600-614. click here for pdf file

Cheung, H., & Kemper, S. (2000). A phonological account for the cross-language variation in working memory processing. Psychological Record, 50, 373-386.

Small, J. A., Kemper, S., Lyons, K. (2000). Sentence repetition and processing resources in Alzheimer's disease. Brain and Language, 75, 232-258.

Vandeputte, D. D., Kemper, S., Hummert, M. L., Kemtes, K. A., Shaner, J., & Segrin, C. (1999). Social skills of older people: Conversations in Same and Mixed Aged Dyads. Discourse Processes, 27, 55-76.

Kemper, S., & Kemtes, K. (1999). The Age-Invariance of Working Memory Measures and Non-invariance of Producing Complex Syntax: A Reply to Caplan and Waters. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 102-103.

Kemtes, K. A., & Kemper, S. (1999). Aging and the resolution of quantifier scope effects. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 54, P350-P360.

Kemper, S., & Harden, T. (1999). Experimentally disentangling what's beneficial about elderspeak from what's not. Psychology and Aging, 14, 656-670. click here for pdf file

Kemper, S., & Kliegl, R. (1999). Constraints on Language: Aging, Memory, and Grammar. New York: Kluwer Academic.

Kemper, S., Othick, M., Gerhing, H., Gubarchuk, J., & Billington, C. (1998). The effects of practicing speech accommodations to older adults. Applied Psycholinguistics, 19, 175-192.

Kemper, S., Ferrell, P., Harden, T., Finter-Urczyk, A., & Billington, C. (1998). The use of elderspeak by young and older adults to impaired and normal older adults. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 5, 43-55.

Kemper, S. , Finter-Urczyk, A.., Ferrell, P., Harden, T. & Billington, C. (1998). Using Elderspeak with Older Adults. Discourse Processes, 25, 55-73.

Small, J. A., Kemper, S., & Lyons, K. (1997). Sentence comprehension in Alzheimer's disease: Effects of grammatical complexity, speech rate, and repetition. Psychology and Aging, 12, 1-11.

Kemtes, K. A., & Kemper, S. (1997). Younger and older adults on-line processing of syntactic ambiguities. Psychology and Aging, 12, 362-371

Kemper, S. (1997). Metalinguistic judgments in normal aging and Alzheimer's disease. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 52, P147-P155. click here for pdf file

Gubarchuk, I., & Kemper, S. (1997). Effects of aging on the production of Russian. Discourse Processes, 23, 63-83.

Small, J. A., Lyons, K., & Kemper, S. (1997). Grammatical abilities in Parkinson's disease. Neuropsychologia, 35, 1571-1576.

Kemper, S., Othick, M., Warren, J., Gubarchuk, J., & Gerhing, H. (1996). Facilitating older adults' performance on a referential communication task through speech accommodations. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 3, 37-55.

von Hecker, U., Crockett, W. H., Hummert, M. L., & Kemper, S. (1996). Social cliques as mental models. European Journal of Social Psychology, 26, 741-749.

Kemper, S., Rice, K., & Chen, Y-J. (1995). Complexity metrics and growth curves for measuring grammatical development from five to ten. First Language, 15, 1-10.

Kemper, S., Vandeputte, D., Rice, K., Cheung, H., & Gubarchuk, J. (1995). Speech adjustments to aging during a referential communication task. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 14, 40-59.

Kemper, S., Lyons, K., & Anagnopoulos, C. (1995). Joint story-telling by Alzheimer's patients and their spouses. Discourse Processes, 20, 205-217.

Kemper, S. (1994). Elderspeak: Speech Accommodations to Older Adults. Aging and Cognition, 1, 17-28.

Kemper, S., Jackson, J. D., Cheung, H., & Anagnopoulos, C. A. (1994). Enhancing older adults' reading comprehension. Discourse Processes, 16, 405-428.

Cheung, H., & Kemper, S. (1994). Recall and articulation of English and Chinese words under memory preload. Language and Speech, 37, 147-161.

Kemper, S., Anagnopoulos, C., Lyons, K., & Heberlein, W. (1994). Speech accommodations to dementia. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 49, P223-229.

Lyons, K., Kemper, S., LaBarge, E., Ferraro, F. R., Balota, D., Storandt, M. (1994). Oral language and Alzheimer's disease: A reduction in syntactic complexity. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 1, 271-281. click here for pdf file

Abstracts

Kemper, S., McDowd, J., Metcalf, K., & Liu, C.-J. (2008). Young and older adults’ reading of distracters. Educational Gerontology, 34, 489-502. We used eye-tracking technology to examine young and older adults’ performance in the reading with distraction paradigm. One-, 2- and 4-word distracters that formed meaningful phrases were used. There were marked age differences in fixation patterns. Young adults’ fixations to the distracters and targets increased with distracter length, suggesting that they were attempting to integrate the distracters with the sentence and had more and more difficulty doing so as the distracters increased in length. Young adults did have better comprehension of the sentences than older adults and also better recognition memory for target words and distracters.

Brown, C., Snodgrass, T., Kemper, S., Herman, R., & Covington, M. (2008). Automatic measurement of propositional idea density from part-of-speech tagging. Behavioral Research Methods, 40, 540-545. CPIDR (Computerized Propositional Idea Density Rate, pronounced “spider” is a computer program that determines the propositional idea density (P-Density ) of an English text automatically on the basis of part-of-speech tags. The key idea is that propositions correspond roughly to verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions. After tagging the parts of speech using MontyLingua (Liu, 2004), CPIDR applies numerous rules to adjust the count, such as combining auxiliary verbs with the main verb. A “speech mode” is provided in which CPIDR rejects repetitions and a wider range of fillers. CPIDR is a user-friendly Windows NET application distributed as open-source freeware under GPL. Tested against human raters, it agrees with the consensus of two human raters better than the team of five raters agree with each other (r(80 = 0.97 vs. r(10) = 0.82, respectively).

Kemper, S., & Liu, C. – J. (2007). Eye movements of young and older adults during reading. Psychology and Aging, 22, 84-94. The eye movements of young and older adults were tracked as they read sentences varying in syntactic complexity. In Experiment 1, cleft object and object relative clause sentences were more difficult to process than cleft subject and subject relative clause sentences; however, older adults made many more regressions, resulting in increased regression path fixation times and total fixation times, than young adults while processing cleft object and object relative clause sentences. In Experiment 2, older adults experience more difficulty than young adults while reading cleft and relative clause sentences with temporary syntactic ambiguities created by deleting the “that” complementizers. Regression analyses indicated that readers with smaller working memories need more regressions and longer fixation times to process cleft object and object relative clause sentences. These results suggest that age-associated declines in working memory do affect syntactic processing.

Kemper, S., McDowd, J., Pohl, P., Herman, R., & Jackson, S. (2006). Revealing language deficits following stroke: the cost of doing two things at once. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 13, 115-139.The costs of doing two things were assessed for a group of healthy older adults and older adults who were tested at least six months after a stroke. A baseline language sample was compared to language samples collected while the participants were performing concurrent motor tasks or selective ignoring tasks. Whereas the healthy older adults' showed few costs due to the concurrent task demands, the language samples from the stroke survivors were disrupted by the demands of doing two things at once. The dual task measures reveal long-lasting effects of strokes that were not evident when stroke survivors were assessed using standard clinical tools.

Kemper, S., & McDowd, J. (2006). Eye movements of young and older adults while reading with distraction. Psychology and Aging, 21, 32-39. The authors used eye-tracking technology to examine young and old adults’ on-line performance in the reading in distraction paradigm. Participants read target sentences and answered comprehension questions following each sentence. In some sentences, single word distracters were presented in either italic or red font. Distracters could be related or unrelated to the target text. On-line measures including probability of fixation, fixation duration, and number of fixations to distracting text revealed no age differences in text processing. However, young adults did have an advantage over older adults in overall reading time and text comprehension. These results provide no support for an inhibition deficit account of age differences in the reading in distraction paradigm, but are consistent with Dywan and Murphy’s (1995) suggestion that older adults are less able than young to distinguish target and distracter information held in working memory.

Altmann, L., & Kemper, S. (2006). Effects of age, animacy and activation order on sentence production, 21, 322-354. The current study examines whether young and older adults have simlar preferences for animate-subject and active sentences, and for using the order of activation of a verb's arguments to determine sentence structure. Ninety-six participants produced sentences in response to three-word stimuli that included a verb and two nouns differing in animacy. Dependent varialbes included accuracy, sentence structure produced, and production times for active vs. passive sentences. Neither group shows a strict preference for active sentences, but the two groups are differentially sensitive to animacy and the order of noun activation. Results suggest that sentence structure choice is a probabilistc, constraint-satisfaction process during which these factors interact.

Kemper, S., & Herman, R. (2006). Age differences in memory load interference effects in syntactic processing. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 61B, P327-323. The effects of a memory load on syntactic processing by younger and older adults were examined. Participants were asked to remember a noun phrase (NP) memory load while they read sentences varying in syntactic complexity. Two types of NPs were used as memory loads: proper names or definite descriptions referring to occupations or roles. The NPs used in the sentence and memory load either matched, e.g., all proper names or all occupations, or mismatched. Complex sentences were read more slowly than simpler sentences; for young adults, this complexity effect was exacerbated when memory interference was generated by matching NPs in the sentence and memory load, whereas for older adults, memory load interference did not vary with sentence complexity or memory load matching. These results suggest that a general reduction in older adults’ processing capacity was produced by the memory load whereas the matching memory loads and sentence NPs produced a more specific form of interference that affected young adults’ on-line processing.

Kemper, S., Herman, R.E., Nartowicz, J. (2005). Different effects of dual task demands on the speech of young and older adults. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 12, 345-358. Young and older adults provided language samples in response to elicitation questions while concurrently performing 3 different tasks. The language samples were scored on three dimensions: fluency, grammatical complexity, and content. Previous research had suggested the hypothesis that the restricted speech register of older adults is buffered from the costs of dual task demands. This hypothesis was tested by comparing language samples collected during a baseline condition with those produced while the participants were performing the concurrent tasks. The results indicate that young and older adults adopt different strategies when confronted with dual task demands. Young adults shift to a restricted speech register when confronted with dual task demands. Older adults, who were already using a restricted speech register, became less fluent although the grammatical complexity and informational content of their speech was preserved. Hence, some but not all aspects of older adults’ speech are buffered from dual task demands.

Kemper, S., Herman, R.E., Liu, C.J. (2004). Sentence production by younger and older adults in controlled contexts. Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 58B, P220-P224. click for pdf
This experiment compared young and older adults’ abilities to produce complex sentences under controlled conditions. Participants were asked to memorize sentence stems differing in syntactical complexity and then to produce a complete sentence using the stem. The length, complexity, and content of young adults’ responses varied with the syntactical complexity of the stems whereas the older adults’ responses did not. These results suggest that working memory processing limitations impose a “ceiling” on older adults’ production of complex sentences, limiting their length, complexity, and content.

Kemper, S., Herman, R., Lian, C. (2004). Age differences in sentence production. Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 58B, P220-P224.
Two experiments have been completed using experimental techniques to study language production under controlled conditions. In Experiment 1, young and older adults were given 2, 3, and 4 words and asked to compose a sentence. Older adults' responses were similar to those of young adults when given 2 or 3 words. When given 4 words, the older adults made more errors and their responses were shorter and less elaborate tan the young adults'. In Experiment 2, simple intransitive verbs (smiled), transitive verbs (replaced), and complement-taking verbs (expected) were contrasted. Older adults' responses were similar to those of young adults given intransitive and transitive verbs. Given complement-taking verbs, young adults produced complex sentences whereas the older adults produced simpler, less complex sentences and they made many errors. Both experiments found that older adults respond more slowly than young.

Kemper, S., Crow, A., & Kemtes, K. (2004). Eye-fixation patterns of high- and low-span young and older adults: Down the garden path and back again. Psychology and Aging, 19, 157-170. Eye fixation patterns for older adults and young adults were monitored as they read sentences containing temporary syntactic ambiguities such as "The experienced soldiers warned about the dangers conducted the midnight raid." Young and older adults' fixation patterns were similar except that odler adults made many more regressions to the Subject NP for ambiguous sentences. In a second experiment, young and older adults classified as high and low readers were compared. First pass fixation times for high and low span readers were similar; however, high and low span readers adopted different processing strategies when they encountered disambiguating information. High span readers were able to quickly resolve the ambiguity whereas low span readers required many regressions to the Subject NP in order to resolve the ambiguity. As a consequence, total fixation times for low span readers were longer than those for high span readers. High span readers were also able to use the focus operator ONLY (e.g., "Only experienced soldiers warned about the dangers...") to immediately resolve the temporary ambiguity. No age group differences were observed. These results are discussed with reference to contemporary theories of the role of workign memory in sentence processing.

Humphrey, H., Radel, J. S., & Kemper, S. (2004). The Time Course of Metonymic Language Text Processing by Older and Younger Adults. Experimental Aging Research, 30, 75-90. The influence of aging on the processing of figurative language was investigated by utilizing Frisson and Pickering's (1999) paradigm, monitoring eye fixation times to target words in sentences. First fixation times and total fixation times were analyzed for familiar and unfamiliar metonymies and literal control sentences. Frisson et al. (1999) found that processing figurative and literal expressions yielded similar patterns of eye fixations. In the current study, these methods and results were replicated and extended to include older adults' processing of metonymies. This investigation replicated their findings for young adults and found that older adults produced the same processing patterns as young adults.

Williams, K., Holmes, F., Kemper, S., & Marquis, J. (2003). Written language clues to dementia: An analysis of the letters of King James VI/I. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 53, P42-P44 . Reductions in language complexity normally occur in older adults due to decreased working memory and rate of language processing. Comparative measures can reveal whether linguistic change is due to normal aging or dementia. Linguistic analysis of a series of letters of King James, 1566-1625, investigated whether he exhibited a normative or atypical pattern of change. Fifty-seven letters from the years 1604 to 1624 were analyzed. Data modeling revealed a quadratic pattern of decline in written language complexity with increased diversity of vocabulary corresponding to historical reports of illness around 1616-1619. This investigation demonstrates how language analysis can provide valuable insight to normal and pathological cognitive changes of aging as well as to the understanding of historical figures.

Kemper, S., Herman, R. E., & Lian, C. H. T. (2003). The Costs of Doing Two Things at Once for Young and Older Adults: Talking while Walking, Finger Tapping, and Ignoring Speech or Noise. Psychology and Aging, 18, 181-192 . Young and older adults provided language samples in response to elicitation questions while concurrently performing different tasks including walking, , finger tapping, and ignoring speech or noise. The language samples were scored on three dimensions: fluency, grammatical complexity, and content. The hypothesis that working memory limitations affect speech production by older adults was tested by comparing language samples collected during a baseline condition with those produced while the participants were performing the concurrent tasks. There were baseline differences: older adults' speech was less fluent and less complex than young adults' speech. Young adults adopted a different strategy in response to the dual task demands than older adults; they reduced sentence length and grammatical complexity while performing the concurrent tasks. In contrast, older adults shifted to a reduced speech rate in the dual task conditions.

Mitzner, T., & Kemper, S. (2003). Oral and Written Language in Late Adulthood: Findings from the Nun Study. Experimental Aging Research, 29, 457-474. As part of the Nun Study, a longitudinal investigation of aging and Alzheimer's disease, oral and written autobiographies from 118 older women were analyzed to examine the relationship between spoken and written language. The written language samples were more complex than the oral samples, both conceptually and grammatically. The relationship between linguistic measures and participant characteristics was also examined. The results suggest that the grammatical and conceptual characteristics of oral and written language are affected by participant differences in education, cognitive status, and physical function and that written language samples have greater power than oral language samples to differentiate between high and low ability older adults.

Williams, K., Kemper, S., & Hummert, M. L. (2003). Improving Nursing Home Communication: An Intervention to Reduce Elderspeak. The Gerontologist, 43, 243-248. Opportunities for social interaction are lacking within today's nursing homes and staff frequently communicate messages of dependence, incompetence, and control to residents. This study evaluated a brief educational program designed to increase staff awareness of intergenerational speech modifications such as elderspeak and strategies to enhance communication. Design: A communication-training program was provided to Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs) (n=20) in five nursing homes. Audio recordings of staff interactions with residents before and after training were transcribed, coded, and compared on features of elderspeak. Results: After the training, CNAs reduced their use of elderspeak including terms of endearment, inappropriate collective pronouns, and shortened sentence length. In addition, the emotional tone of staff speech with residents was rated as less controlling and more respectful after the training while caring qualities were maintained. Speech rate did not change significantly. Implications: Teaching CNAs to reduce elderspeak holds promise as an approach to improving the social environment in nursing homes.

Kemper, S., & Sumner, A. (2001). The structure of verbal abilities in young and older adults. Psychology and Aging, 16, 312-322. Four measures of verbal ability derived from language sample analysis as well as 11 other measures of vocabulary, verbal fluency, and memory span were obtained from a sample of young adults and a sample of older adults. First, exploratory factor analysis was used to analyze the structure of the 11 vocabulary, fluency, and span measures for each age group. Then an "extension" analysis was performed using structural modeling techniques to determine how the language samples measures were related to the other measures. One language sample measure, D-Level was associated with measures of working memory including reading span and digit span; two, MLU and TTR, were associated with the vocabulary measures; the fourth measure, P-Density, was associated with the fluency measures as a measure of processing efficiency.

Kemper, S., Greiner, L.H., Marquis, J.G., Prenovost, K., & Mitzner, T.L. (2001). Language decline across the life span: Findings from the nun study. Psychology and Aging, 16, 227-239. The present study examines linguistic abilities over the lifespan using language samples from the Nun Study, a longitudinal, epidemiological study of risk factors for dementia and Alzheimer=s disease. Two measures of linguistic ability, grammatical complexity and idea density, were obtained from autobiographical, written language samples contributed by the participants when they were, on average, 22.0, 47.6, 74.6, and 83.1 years of age. Participants who had met criteria for dementia by the time of the 1995-1996 assessment were contrasted with those who did not. The general linear mixed model was used to model change in linguistic ability. In addition, covariates related to convent membership and adult educational experiences were investigated as related to the variability in the initial level of grammatical complexity or idea density and to the variability in the age- or time-related change in these measures. Grammatical complexity initially averaged 4.78 ( on a 0 to 7 point scale) for participants who did not meet criteria for dementia and declined .04 units per year; grammatical complexity for participants who met criteria for dementia initially averaged 3.86 and declined .03 units per year. Idea density averaged 5.35 propositions per 10 words initially for participants who did not meet criteria for dementia and declined an average of .03 units per year whereas idea density averaged 4.34 propositions per 10 words initially for participants who met criteria for dementia and declined .02 units per year. Convent membership did affect the initial level of linguistic ability as well as the rate of decline. Adult experiences, in general, did not moderate the decline in linguistic ability.

Kemper, S., Thompson, M., & Marquis, J.G. (2001). Longitudinal change in language production: Effects of aging and dementia on grammatical complexity and propositional content. Psychology and Aging, 16, 600-614. Mixed modeling was used to examine longitudinal changes in linguistic ability in healthy older adults and older adults with dementia. Language samples, vocabulary scores, and digit span scores were collected annually from healthy older adults and semi-annually from older adults with dementia. The language samples were scored for grammatical complexity and propositional content. For the healthy group, an age-related decline in grammatical complexity was observed. The decline was most rapid during the mid-70s. Modeling indicated that initial digit span was associated with change in grammatical complexity over advancing age but did not fully explain the between-subject variation in initial grammatical complexity or its decline. A similar pattern of decline in propositional content was observed. Modeling indicated initial vocabulary was related to initial propositional content, and those with higher initial vocabulary declined more rapidly in propositional content with advancing age. For the dementing group, grammatical complexity and propositional content also declined over time, regardless of age. The best-fitting models for this group also indicated that grammatical complexity was related to digit span whereas propositional content was related to vocabulary. Rates of decline were uniform across individuals when the respective covariates were included in the models. These analyses reveal how both grammatical complexity and propositional content are related to late-life changes in cognition in healthy older adults as well as those with dementia. Alzheimer's disease accelerates this decline, regardless of age.

Vandeputte, D. D., Kemper, S., Hummert, M.L., Kemtes, K. K., Shaner, J., & Segrin. (1999). Social skills of older people: Conversations in same and mixed age dyads. Discourse Processes, 27, 55-76. Previous research has indicated a relationship between lack of social skills and loneliness in young adults. This framework was extended to study older adult's social skills in two experiments examining conversational interactions between older, younger, and mixed-age dyads. The conversations were coded for social skill using partner attention statements as the measure of social skill. Partner attention statements includes partner references, questions, and topic continuations. The Beck Depression Inventory, UCLA Loneliness Scale, and a measure of social anxiety were administered to study relationship of these psychosocial variables to young and older adults' social skills. In neither study was a depression or social anxiety related to self-reported loneliness for either young or older adults. Further, Loneliness was not related to young or older adults' social skill as measured by partner attention. However, social anxiety was related to social skill during intergenerational conversations: both young and older adults who experienced more social anxiety at being paired with a partner from the other age group make fewer partner attentional statements. In addition, both older and young adults exhibited a greater degree of social skill when interacting with young partners.

Kemper, S., & Kliegl, R. (1999). Constraints on Language: Aging, Memory, and Grammar. New York: Kluwer Academic. From the Preface: A debate about the role of working memory in language processing has become center- most in psycholinguistics (Caplan & Waters, in press; Just & Carpenter, 1992; Just, Carpenter, & Keller, 1996; Waters & Caplan, 1996). This debate concerns which aspects of language processing are vulnerable to working memory limitations, how working memory is best measured, and whether compensatory processes can offset working memory limitations. Age-comparative studies are particularly relevant to this debate for several reasons: difficulties with language and communication are frequently mentioned by older adults and signal the onset of Alzheimer's dementia and other pathologies associated with age; older adults commonly experience working memory limitations that affect their ability to perform everyday activities; the rapid aging of the United States population has forced psychologists and gerontologists to examine the effects of aging on cognition, drawing many investigators to the study of cognitive aging. Older adults constitute ideal population for studying how working memory limitations affect cognitive performance, particularly language and communication. Age-comparative studies of cognitive processes have advanced our understanding of the temporal dynamics of cognition as well as the working memory demands of many types of tasks (Kliegl, Mayr, & Krampe, 1994; Mayr & Kliegl, 1993). The research findings reviewed in this volume have clear implications - for addressing the practical problems of older adults as consumers of leisure time-reading, radio and television broadcasts, as targets of medical, legal, and financial documents, and as participants in a web of service agencies and volunteer activities. Older adults are often the recipients of "elderspeak," an insulting and patronizing form of address which is intended to enhance older adults' comprehension (Kemper, 1992; Kemper, Finter- Urczyk, Ferrell, Harden, & Billington, in press); yet elderspeak, by conveying a sense of disrespect, may offend older adults, reducing intergenerational contact and thereby indirectly contributing to older adults' cognitive and social decline (Ryan, Giles, Bartolucci, & Henwood, 1986). Effective strategies for enhancing older adults' comprehension must be developed which will minimize processing demands without relying on "baby talk." Broadcasts and texts targeted at older adults must be adapted to slower information processing rates and reduced working memory capacity if older adults are to continue to be informed and engaged. The chapters in this volume examine what is known about memory, aging, and grammar in order to better understand how such constraints affect language and communication. Plan of the Book The contributors to this volume fall into three clusters: (1) Leading cognitive aging researchers with special expertise in language production and comprehension (Kemper, Burke, Kliegl, Stine-Morrow, Waters, Wingfield); (2) Syntacticians concerned with developing performance-based models of language (Frazier and Fanselow); (3) Neuroscientists studying language processing (Gunter, Caplan, Kempler). These researchers adopt a variety of methodological approaches to the study of language processing including psycholinguistic investigations of comprehension and production, psychometric studies of the component processes of reading and of individual differences, neuroimaging studies of linguistic function, and neurolinguistic investigations of pathologies of language. Research populations including young and older adults, older adults with dementia and other age-related diseases, and speakers of English and German. The first set of chapters draws upon recent research in cognitive aging to consider how language production and comprehension are constrained by aging. Studies of normal aging adults offer a unique opportunity to study the role of working memory in language processes. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of language processing and explores how the architecure of cognition affects language processing. In Chapter 1, Burke draws upon Node Structure Theory in order to consider how asymmetries in language production and perception can arise from limitations of phonological access. She presents new evidence from experimental and naturalistic studies of verbal fluency, word finding, name retrieval, and spelling that highlight how constrains on phonological access can affect older adults. In Chapter 2, Wingfield and Tun focus on studies of spoken language perception to consider the role of working memory and the role of compensatory mechanisms in language processing. In Chapter 3, Stine-Morrow and Soederberg Miller consider how time as a limited resource can affect older adults' reading comprehension. They use regression techniques to decompose the reading process, discovering how some components may be disadvantaged by slower processing whereas other components of reading may be advantaged by slower processing. The chapters in Section 2 focus on syntactic processing. Kemper and Kemtes in Chapter 4 review recent research on the effects of working memory limitations on language processing with an emphasis on syntactic processing. In Chapter 5, Waters and Caplan consider whether there are significant individual differences in working memory, how they best might be measured, and the extent to which such individual differences affect on-line language processing. In Chapter 6, Kliegl and his colleagues investigate how syntactic factors interact to affect older adults' processing of complex constructions. Like the other contributors to this section, they argue that some aspects of language processing are age-invariant whereas others are age-varying. Kliegl et al. also provide a detailed tutorial on alternative experimental paradigms for investigating age invariance in language processing. The contributors in Section 2 identify a mosaic of age-spared versus age-impaired language processes at lexical - sentence - and discourse levels of analysis; age-spared processes appear to be buffered from working memory whereas age-varying processes are dependent on working memory. The third set of chapters offer insights from contemporary models of syntax. Both contributors seek to define which aspects of language are subject to working memory constraints and which are buffered from working memory limitations. In Chapter 7, Fanselow and his colleagues, working from a Minimalist perspective, consider parallels between formal grammatical theory and the operation of the human syntactic parser. They argue that grammars avoid postulating movement operations in the same way that human parsers do. Drawing upon linguistic arguments as well as experimental studies, they consider the costs of movement operations in both German and English. In Chapter 8, Frazier also draws upon linguistic arguments as well as experimental studies of reading to examine how sentence complexity as well as discourse factors can affect comprehension. The final set of chapters draws on neuroscience studies of language processing to examine how working memory may be affected by aging and, in turn, affect language processing. In Chapter 9, Kempler and his colleagues draw on comparative studies of healthy older adults and adults with probable Alzheimer's dementia. They show how Alzheimer's dementia selectively impairs semantic processes, including word retrieval and word comprehension, while sparing basic syntactic processes. In Chapter 10, Gunter and his colleagues from the MPI in Cognitive Neurosciences present evidence for age-related working memory limitations on syntactic processing from a study of event-related potentials (ERPs) measured during a sentence reading task. The effects of syntactic complexity on the pattern of ERPs varied with age and working memory capacity, providing further insight into the role of working memory in syntactic parsing. In Chapter 11, Caplan and Waters look at how the use of positron emission tomography (PET) can help to resolve questions concerning the neurological localization of language processing. They suggest that aging may affect language processing at the level of neurological organization and localization. Kliegl and Kemper provide a summary discussion of issues raised by these chapters in their conclusion.

Kemper, S., & Harden, T. (1999). Experimentally disentangling what's beneficial about elderspeak from what's not. Psychology and Aging, 14, 656-670. Three studies evaluated different varieties of elderspeak using a referential communication task. Experiment 1 compared the effects of syntactic simplifications and semantic elaborations. Experiment 2 contrasted syntactic simplifications and prosodic exaggerations. Experiment 3 contrasted two different syntactic simplification strategies and two different prosodic exaggerations. Providing semantic elaborations and reducing the use of subordinate and embedded clauses benefit older adults and improve their performance on the referential communication task whereas reducing sentence length, slowing speaking rate, and using high pitch do not. The use of short sentences, a slow rate of speaking, and high pitch resulted in older adults' reporting more communication problems. These experiments validate a version of elderspeak which benefits older adults without sounding patronizing and insulting.

Kemtes, K.A., & Kemper, S. (1999). Aging and the resolution of quantifier scope effects. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 54, P350-360. Two experiments were conducted to compare young and older adults' processing of complex sentences involving quantifier scope ambiguities. Young adults were hypothesized to use a mix of syntactic processing strategies to interpret sentences such as Every actor used a prop or An actor used every prop. Older adults, particularly those with limited working memories, were hypothesized to rely on a simple pragmatic principle. Participants read the quantifier sentences and judged whether a continuation sentence "made sense." Reading times for the quantifier sentences and decision times and continuation sentence acceptability judgements were analyzed. Whereas young and older adults exhibited similar patterns of reading times for the quantifier sentences, they preferred different continuations for the Every...a quantifier sentences. As predicted, both young adults and older adults interpreted a quantifier sentence such as An actor used every prop as referring to a single entity resulting in a preference for continuations such as The actor was on the stage. In contrast, young and older adults made different interpretations of a quantifier sentence such as Every actor used a prop; young adults preferred continuations postulating multiple entities such as The props were on the stage whereas older adults, particularly those with working memory limitations, preferred continuations with a single entity such as The prop was on the stage. These results support models of the effects of aging on language processing in which immediate syntactic analysis is not affected by aging or working memory limitations whereas post-comprehension processes are affected by aging and/or working memory limitations.

Kemper, S., Othick, M., Gerhing, H., Gubarchuk, J., Billington, C. (1998). The effects of practicing speech accommodations to older adults. Applied Psycholinguistics, 19, 175-192. This study evaluated the effects of practice with a referential communication task on the form and effectiveness of elderspeak, a speech register targeted at older listeners. The task required the listener to reproduce a route drawn on a map following the speaker's instructions. Young adults were given extended practice with this task to determine if they would modify their fluency, prosody, grammatical complexity, semantic content, or discourse style. The effectiveness of the young speaker's instructions was also evaluated in terms of how accurately their older partners could reproduce the routes and in terms of the older adults' evaluations of their own communicative competence. With practice, the young adults' instructions became shorter, simpler, and slower and more repetitious; however, these selective changes did not affect the older adults' accuracy but did result in lower self-ratings of communicative competence by their older partners. In a second study, a new group of young adults was given extended practice with young adults as partners. The practice effects were limited to fluency (sentence length and speech rate) and had no effect on the young partners' accuracy or self-ratings of communicative competence.

Kemper, S., Finter-Urczyk, A., Ferrell, P., Harden, T., & Billington, C. (1998).Using elderspeak with older adults. Discourse Processes, 25, 55-73. This study examined the use of elderspeak, a speech register targeted at older listeners, during a referential communication task. The task required the listener to reproduce a route drawn on a map following the speaker's instructions. Young adults were paired with older adults who performed naturally or who followed a script simulating dementia to determine if the young adults would modify their fluency, prosody, grammatical complexity, semantic content, or discourse style. When paired with older adults simulating dementia, the young adults' instructions were longer, more informative, and more repetitious; however, the young adults did not alter their prosody or grammatical complexity. Together with previous findings on practice effects on elderspeak, these findings suggest that young adults adjust their speech to the perceived communicative needs of older listeners by varying information content but not by varying information delivery.

Kemper, S., Ferrell, P., Harden, T., Finter-Urczyk, A., & Billington, C. (1998). The use of elderspeak by young and older adults to impaired and unimpaired listeners. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 5, 43-55. This study examined the use of elderspeak, a speech register targeted at older listeners, by young and older adults. A simulation paradigm was used: The participants were asked to provide a set of instructions for navigating a route drawn on a map and they were given photographs and short biographical descriptions of listeners who were described either as healthy, active adults living independently or as older adults who were experiencing cognitive problems including memory lapses, disorientation, and failing to recognize family members. The fluency, prosody, grammatical complexity, semantic content, and discourse style of the instructions was compared. In addition, the participants were asked to rate the appropriateness of various speech accommodations, such as using long sentences, exaggerated intonation, and repetition, for the listeners. The results indicated that both young and older adults rated the speech accommodations as appropriate for use with cognitively impaired older adults. The young adults actually used such speech accommodations in response to the referential communication task whereas the older adults adopted a more limited range of speech accommodations for the impaired listeners.

Gubarchuk, L. and Kemper, S. (1997). Effects of aging on the production of Russian. Discourse Processing, 23, 63-83. Two studies compared young and older adults' production of complex syntactic structures in Russian, a morphologically rich language with free word order. A variety of measures of content, fluency, clause structure, and grammatical form were assessed from oral language samples collected from young adult Russians visiting the United States, older adults who had recently emigrated to the United States from Russia, and from young and older Russians living in Moscow, Russia. Content and fluency in Russian was associated with Russian vocabulary knowledge, and influenced by educational level and knowledge of English and other languages. The production of grammatical forms, including clause structure and word order variation, was associated with digit span suggesting that working memory limitations affect the use of clause and word order variations in Russian.

Kemper, S. (1997). Metalinguistic judgements in normal aging and Alzheimer's disease. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 52, 147-155. This study compared sentence acceptability judgements from young and healthy older adults and older adults with dementia due to probable Alzheimer's disease. Two types of sentences were contrasted: one type involved contrasts among verb alterations in which semantic distinctions between verbs regulate the acceptability of phrase structure variations; the second type involved contrasts among directional transformation in which constrains on the movement of noun phrases determine the linear order of main and embedded clauses. The primary findings were that metalinguistic judgments by healthy older adults as well as those with probable Alzheimer's reflected processing demands on working memory.

Small, J. A., Lyons, K., & Kemper, S. (1997). Grammatical abilities in Parkinson's disease: Evidence from written sentences. Neuropsychologia, 35, 1571-1576. This study examined the grammatical content of written sentences elicited from 96 Parkinson's patients, 30 Parkinson's with dementia patients, and a 167 control subjects. Parkinson's patients without dementia or with mild dementia presented no impairments in sentence length, syntactic complexity or amount of information content. Moderately demented Parkinson's patients showed reduced sentence length and information content but normal syntactic complexity. This pattern of results provides evidence that lexical-semantic content is more susceptible to decline than syntactic structure with the progressive of dementia in Parkinson's disease.

Small, J. A., Kemper, S., Lyons, K. (1997). Sentence comprehension in Alzheimer's disease: Effects of grammatical complexity, speech rate, and repetition. Psychology and Aging, 12, 3- 11. Caregivers of patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease (AD) are often advised to modify their speech to facilitate the patient's sentence comprehension. Three common recommendations are to (a) speak in simple sentences (b) speak slowly, and (c) repeat one's utterance, using the same words. These three speech modifications were experimentally manipulated in order to investigate their individual and combined effects on sentence comprehension in AD. Fifteen patients with mild to moderate AD and 20 healthy older persons were tested on a sentence comprehension task with sentences varying in terms of (a) degree of grammatical complexity, (b) rate of presentation (normal vs. slow), and (c) form of repetition (verbatim vs. paraphrase). The results indicated a significant decline in sentence comprehension for the AD group. Sentence comprehension improved, however, after the sentence was repeated in either verbatim or paraphrased form. However, the patients' comprehension did not improve for sentences presented at the slow speech rate. This pattern of results is explained vis-a- vis the patients' working memory loss. The findings challenge the appropriateness of several clinical recommendations.

Kemtes, K. A., Kemper, S. (1997). Younger and older adults' on-line processing of syntactically ambiguous sentences. Psychology and Aging, 12, 362-371. Off-line studies of younger and older adults' processing of syntactically complex sentences have shown that there is a consistent negative relationship between task performance and working memory for older adults. However, it is not evident from these studies whether working memory affects the immediate syntactic analysis of a sentence, off-line processes, or both. In the current study an on-line reading paradigm was used to examine the working memory capacity-constrained sentence processing model from M.C. MacDonald, M.A. Just, and P.A. Carpenter (1992). Working memory resolution (main verb vs. relative clause) interacted to influence younger and older adults' on-line reading times and off-line sentence comprehension.

Snowdon, D. A., Kemper, S., Mortimer, J. A. Greiner, L. H. , Wekstein, D. R., Markesbery, W. R. (1996). Linguistic ability in early life and cognitive function and Alzheimer's disease in late life: Findings from the Nun Study. Journal of the American Medical Association, 275, 528-532. Objective: To determine if linguistic ability in early life is associated with cognitive function and Alzheimer's disease in late life. Design: Two measures of linguistic ability in early life, idea density and grammatical complexity, were derived from autobiographies written at a mean age of 22 years. Approximately 58 years later, the women who wrote these autobiographies participated in an assessment of cognitive function, and those who subsequently died were evaluated neuropathologically. Setting: Convents in the United States participating in the Nun Study; primarily convents in the Milwaukee, Wis, area. Participants: Cognitive function was investigated in 93 participants who were aged 75 to 95 years at the time of their assessments, and Alzheimer's disease was investigated in the 14 participants who died at 79 to 96 years of age. Main Outcome Measures: Seven neuropsychological tests and neuropathologically confirmed Alzheimer's disease. Results: Low idea density and low grammatical complexity in autobiographies written in early life were associated with low cognitive test scores in late life. Low idea density in early life had stronger and more consistent associations with poor cognitive function than did low grammatical complexity. Among the 14 sisters who died, neuropathologically confirmed Alzheimer's disease was present in all of those with low idea density in early life and in none of those with high idea density. Conclusions: Low linguistic ability in early life was a strong predictor of poor cognitive function and Alzheimer's disease in late life.

Kemper, S., Lyons, K, Anagnopoulos, C. (1995). Joint storytelling by patients with Alzheimer's disease and their spouses. Discourse Processes, 20, 205-217. Personal narratives were collected from a group of participants with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) and their spouses in two conditions. First, solo narratives were elicited from the participants with AD and their spouses separately, and then joint narratives were elicited from each dyad. The analysis compared the ability of participants with AD to spontaneously provide settings, participants, and episodes in their solo narratives to their ability to supply this information when prompted by their spouses during collaborative storytelling . The spouses were able to elicit many deficit many details about the significant events of their partners' lives by prompting for story constituents.

Kemper, S., Vandeputte, D., Rice, K., Cheung, H., Gubarchuk, J. (1995). Speech adjustments to aging during a referential communication task. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 14, 40-59. This study used a referential communication task to investigate the effectiveness of elderspeak, a speech register targeted at older listeners. The tasks required the listener to reproduce a route drawn on a map or array of dots, following the speaker's instructions. Dyads of young-young, old-old, and young-old adults were compared with regard to measures of fluency, prosody, grammatical complexity, semantic content, and speaker and listener style. Although the older speakers showed little variation in response to listener age or task difficulty, the young speakers adopted a simplified speech style when addressing the older listeners. These simplifications may have been triggered by the verbal responses of the older listeners. Older listeners did benefit from these speech adjustments with regard to the accuracy of their maps and dot patterns. Despite the effectiveness of the young adults' speech adjustment, older adults reported more expressive and receptive problems when interacting with the young adults.

Kemper, S. (1994). Elderspeak: Speech accommodations to older adults. Aging and Cognition, 1, 17-28. Ten service providers and 10 caregivers were recorded as they spoke to groups of younger or older adults. Ten-minute speech samples were analyzed for the occurrence of "elderspeak," systematic speech accommodations directed towards older adults, using measures of syntactic complexity, verbal fluency, propositional content, lexical choice, discourse organization, speech rate, and other stylistic markers. Both the caregivers and service providers adjusted how they spoke to different audiences: They reduced the length and complexity of their utterances, produced more lexical fillers and sentence fragments, used fewer long words of three or more syllables, more utterances per turn and per topic, and more repetitions when addressing older adults. They also spoke more slowly and paused longer when addressing older audiences. Propositional content, type-token ratios, diminutives and tag questions, however, did not vary with audience. These findings confirm prior subjective accounts of the use of an "elderspeak" register.

Kemper, S., Anagnopoulos, C., Lyons, K., & Heberlein, W. (1994). Speech Accommodations to Dementia. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 49, 223-229. This study investigated whether spouses would adopt a specialized speech register when communicating with adults with probable Alzheimer's disease. A picture description task was used so that the effectiveness of such speech accommodations could be assessed. The AD subjects did not vary the syntactic complexity, semantic complexity, or content of their descriptions when they were describing individual pictures versus directing their spouse to choose one of four pictures in a barrier task. The spouse's picture descriptions were more complex syntactically and semantically than the AD subjects' and included more highly salient elements. The spouses also varied the complexity and content of their descriptions, reducing syntactic and semantic complexity and increasing references to highly salient picture elements during the barrier task. These accommodations appeared to facilitate the AD subjects' performance on the picture description task.

Lyons, K., Kemper, S., LaBarge, E., Ferraro, R., Balota, D., & Storandt, M. (1994). Oral language and Alzheimer's disease: A reduction in syntactic complexity. Aging and Cognition, 1, 271-281. Transcripts of interviews with 117 adults undergoing examination for possible Alzheimer's disease were analyzed. The length, fluency, semantic content, and syntactic complexity of the transcripts varied with the severity of dementia. Although there was a marked increase in the production of sentence fragments with dementia severity, approximately 60% of those produced by the nondemented adults. The grammatical utterances of the mildly demented adults were shorter and syntactically simpler than those produced by the nondemented adults. These results add to the growing literature suggesting a relative preservation of some psycholinguistic functions in demented individuals.

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Language Across the Lifespan: Communication and Aging Laboratory

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