4 Word Domination

Stressed Out

It’s “Assess the window,” not “Asses the window.” You put the wrong emPHAsis on the wrong sylLAble.

—Mike Myers as John Witney in View from the Top (2003)

Spoken language entails a great deal more than just the words that someone says. How words are spoken is also important. Words are composed of syllables, and people selectively emphasize certain syllables for a variety of reasons. In some cases, it’s simply conventional to accentuate a particular syllable within a given word. In other cases, speakers use what linguists refer to as stress to help disambiguate their message or to make clear their intentions. Let’s consider each of these forms of stress in turn.

In many of the world’s languages, speakers will utter one syllable of a word more loudly or at a different pitch relative to the other syllables of that word. Some languages, like Czech and Hungarian, usually stress the first syllable of a word. In Armenian, stress typically falls on the last syllable. In Polish, it’s the second to last. And some languages, like French and Japanese, play no favorites: in general, all syllables are treated the same.

How about English? Well, it’s complicated. English has what is called variable stress: one syllable will be given emphasis, but not in any predictable way. And speakers of different dialects may stress different syllables; for example, the Brits typically stress the first syllable of words borrowed from French (adult, garage, and salon), whereas US speakers stress the last syllable. Speakers of variable-stress languages must learn which syllable receives the stress in each word.

Speakers of languages like English and German also use what is called lexical stress to differentiate between words like the noun “content” (the subject matter of a book) and the adjective “content” (the state of feeling at peace). Speakers also use lexical stress in phrases to disambiguate meaning. A lighthouse keeper is someone who maintains a navigational beacon, whereas a light housekeeper is someone willing to tidy up your house, but who probably won’t wash your windows. In a similar way, “I saw a black bird” means “I saw a bird that was black in color,” whereas I saw a blackbird” means “I saw a thrush belonging to the species Turdus merula.”

Another type of stress is called prosodic stress. This is what allows speakers to differentiate between making statements, which are spoken with a flat intonation (“I’m supposed to wash the windows”), and asking questions, which employ rising intonation (“I’m supposed to wash the windows?”). Prosodic stress also allows clause boundaries to be marked, as in “The employee said the boss is angry” and “The employee, said the boss, is angry.” In written form, the clauses can be disambiguated by commas, but in spoken form, the crucial cue is timing, or the pauses and relative durations of the words in question. In sentences like the examples just given, small timing differences allow listeners to understand who is angry (the boss in the first case, and the employee in the second). In all these ways, stress plays an important role in making clear the meaning of potentially ambiguous words and sentences.

In general, the ability to use prosodic cues like stress and timing is well preserved in older adults. The psychologist Margaret Kjelgaard and her colleagues found that college students and adults in their sixties and seventies similarly use prosodic information to identify clause boundaries in ambiguous sentences.1 However, there are several different prosodic cues, such as loudness, pitch, and timing. Are these cues equally important, and do older adults use them in the same way as younger people?

Ken Hoyte and his collaborators studied the relative contribution of these prosodic factors by using a computer to manipulate prosodic cues in ambiguous sentences. They used sentences like “The employee said the boss is angry” and systematically reduced or removed the loudness, pitch, and timing cues that listeners would normally rely on to figure out who is, in fact, angry. The college students and older participants (average age: mid-seventies) listened to these doctored sentences and were asked to identify, as quickly as possible, the subject of each one (the employee or the boss in our example). The researchers found that both groups were highly accurate in their identifications, although it took the older adults a little longer to make their judgments. Furthermore, both groups relied on the same cues: both younger and older adults principally used subtle timing differences to make their decisions.²

This is not to say that older adults don’t experience difficulties in spoken-language comprehension. One line of research has shown that older speakers of English have more difficulty in understanding accented English spoken by some nonnative speakers.³ Although age-related hearing loss is one possible culprit, many languages have lexical stress patterns that are unlike those of English. As a result, second-language learners of English might not sufficiently differentiate their pronunciation of words like content and content. In an experiment designed to explore this issue, younger (age range: 18–35) and older (age range: 65–90) native English speakers listened to recordings of such words being spoken by other native English speakers and also by native Spanish speakers with varying degrees of accent. The participants’ task was to identify which word was intended. Both the younger and older adults were less accurate when the words were produced with a heavy Spanish accent, although the older adults experienced more difficulty than the younger participants. This was true even for older adults with normal hearing.⁴

An important caveat to this finding is that it doesn’t take into account the effects of prolonged exposure to a given speaker. Everyone finds it easier to understand other speakers as they hear more of their speech, and this process of adaptation occurs for both younger and older adults.⁵ However, older adults with hearing loss may depend more on being able to both see and hear the speaker.⁶

Spelling Ability

It is a damn poor mind indeed which can’t think of at least two ways to spell any word.

—attributed to Andrew Jackson (1833)

A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the other one.

—Baltasar Gracián (1601–1658)

The English language is infamous for its spelling eccentricities. Consequently, as children learn to write, they must commit to memory a large number of spelling rules, as well as their many exceptions. Children’s spelling is commonly tested in spelling bees, which are popular because they make a boring task more interesting by turning it into a competition. The result of such contests and other forms of testing is that most of us stumble into adulthood with tolerably good spelling abilities. Modern conveniences, such as the spellchecking and autocorrect functions in software, have made this task easier. And Google’s “Did you mean” prompt is smart enough that users need only supply an approximation of the intended word in a search query. For many lazy typists, a search engine serves as an ersatz dictionary.

Every day we read large numbers of correctly spelled words in books, periodicals, and online material. Because we see the correct spelling of words over and over again throughout our lives, it is reasonable to assume that our spelling ability should improve over time. As a memory researcher might put it, the representation of the correct forms in long-term memory is being strengthened through repeated exposure. And this seems to be true in general: we do find it easier to recognize someone if we have seen them repeatedly as opposed to just once or twice. But is this the case with words? Does familiarity truly breed accuracy?

Think for a moment about what the US penny looks like. Americans routinely handle these coins several times a day in their financial transactions, and everyone would agree that the one cent piece is extremely familiar. It should be a simple task, therefore, to describe the elements of the coin—especially its front side, since the design hasn’t changed in over a century. You can probably recall that Abe Lincoln appears in profile. But is he facing to the left or the right? What words, if any, appear over his head? Does anything appear to the left and right of the president? Does the date appear somewhere on the front? Don’t feel bad if you are having difficulty remembering these details; you have plenty of company. In a classic study from the late 1970s, the psychologists Ray Nickerson and Marilyn Adams asked undergraduates at Brown University to draw the penny’s front and back faces from memory, and the results were “remarkably poor.”7

Later studies have demonstrated that people also misremember the appearance of other common objects, even those for which the layout of the elements is important, such as keypads on telephones and the placement of characters on keyboards.8 These studies converge on the same surprising result: even frequent exposure to something does not mean that someone will be able to recall it later with a high degree of accuracy.

This fragility of memory has real-world implications for being able to spell words correctly. We encounter misspelled words more frequently than we may realize. Corporations frequently use so-called divergent or sensational spellings, such as “Froot Loops,” “Krispy Kreme,” and “Chick-fil-A,” to call attention to their brands and products. Moviegoers watched Will Smith perform in a film titled The Pursuit of Happyness. And over the years, bands like the Beatles, the Monkees, and Def Leppard have enjoyed varying degrees of popularity. If our ability to remember the appearance of coins or the layout of keyboards can be compromised, does exposure to such misspellings have any effect on our spelling ability? As you might have guessed by now, the answer is yes. The cognitive psychologist Larry Jacoby demonstrated that exposing people to misspelled words in the laboratory made them slower to recognize the correctly spelled forms of the words and impaired their spelling ability.⁹

We might assume that such effects are transitory, but Jacoby reports that his coauthor, Ann Hollingshead, may have sustained long-term damage from her repeated exposure to the misspelled versions used in their experiments. Before joining Jacoby’s lab, Hollingshead had worked as an executive secretary, with a high degree of confidence in her spelling accuracy. However, after serving as the lab technician in a series of such studies, she found that she was making more errors in spelling words, and her confidence in her spelling ability also declined.¹⁰ And just as certain occupations are more physically dangerous than others, it may well be the case that some professions are more cognitively dangerous. Teachers who grade their students’ spelling quizzes, or professors who must decipher their students’ handwritten essay examinations, may be at high risk for losing their spelling confidence and accuracy. As Jacoby and Hollingshead put it in the title of their paper, “Reading student essays may be hazardous to your spelling.”¹¹

Assuming someone is not a member of these high-risk pools, what is the typical trajectory of spelling ability over one’s lifetime? It turns out that this skill seems to be well preserved throughout adulthood. The ability of people in their sixties and early seventies to detect misspellings, for example, is generally on par with college-aged students.¹² Another study documented more spelling inaccuracies for subjects in their eighties compared to participants in their sixties.¹³ However, this disparity may reflect other differences between the groups of subjects. The participants in their sixties performed better on a measure of general cognitive ability (the Mini-mental State Examination) than those in their eighties, and they also had more years of education. So we can’t conclude that the decline in spelling among the oldest participants can be ascribed only to their age. And if you fined this sentens anoying, then your spelling skills are probably in fine shape.

Vocabulary Size

“Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?” asked Mrs. Dodypol.

“It depends,” says I, “how much you used the dictionary before you read it.”

—Alexander Theroux, Darconville’s Cat (1981)

How many words do you know? The question is easy to ask, but hard to answer. What does it mean to “know” a word, anyway? Some words are used very frequently and are part of everyone’s active vocabulary, such as “table” or “happy.” However, there are many others that make up a person’s receptive vocabulary: someone may not use words like “adjudicate” or “quiescent” in conversation, but she knows what those words mean when she encounters them in print. And then there are words that are even less commonly encountered, whose meanings may be only partly understood. These so-called frontier words might include terms like “anathema” and “obsequious.”14 Most people would be hard-pressed to provide precise definitions of these two words, although they are probably aware that they mean something negative. And if you do know what “obsequious” means, should you automatically get credit for also knowing its derived forms, like “obsequiously” and “obsequiousness”? And how could you measure the size of someone’s vocabulary without asking him about each of the hundreds of thousands of words that make up a language like English? Clearly, you would need to use some sort of sampling technique.

A common method for estimating vocabulary size involves selecting a number of words from a dictionary at random. Researchers then give these word lists to people to see how many they know. The percentage of known words is then multiplied by the total number of words in the dictionary. And voilà—there’s your answer! However, as we have already pointed out, the issue of derived forms complicates such estimates, and even the size of the dictionary turns out to be a factor. Not surprisingly, therefore, such estimates vary widely, although an oft-cited number is about 17,000 base words for the “average educated native” speaker of English.¹⁵

So do older adults know more words than younger adults? This seems likely, since older adults have had more years of exposure to print than their younger counterparts. As usual, however, we have to be wary when comparing younger apples to older oranges. You might think, for example, that younger adults of the early twenty-first century read less than their elders. But you would be wrong: they report reading just as much, if not more, albeit in different ways, such as via online sources.¹⁶ It’s also the case that different measures of vocabulary yield different results for younger and older participants.¹⁷

With these caveats in mind, researchers have consistently found larger vocabularies for older adults compared to younger adults. Eugene Zechmeister and his colleagues, using a variation of the dictionary approach just described, estimated that college students have an average vocabulary size of about 16,000 words. Individuals in a group of older adults (average age: 76) living in a retirement village near Chicago were estimated to have a vocabulary size of over 21,000 words.¹⁸ In another study, a sample of older adult speakers of Hebrew (average age: 75) outperformed younger and middle-aged counterparts on a vocabulary task. In this study, the participants were also asked to report how confident they were that they knew each word. The older adults were justifiably more confident in their ratings. This greater metacognitive awareness seems to arise from “a feeling of mastery of their vocabulary knowledge [gained] over a lifetime of word usage.”¹⁹ In short, older adults know more words, know what they mean, and know that they know them.

Joshua Hartshorne and Laura Germine conducted a large online study with participants ranging in age from ten to sixty-nine. They administered parts of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-III) and found that vocabulary knowledge peaks in the mid-sixties, which is decades after performance peaks for cognitive processes like short-term and working memory.²⁰

It is tempting to conclude that the word-finding problems we discussed earlier may be the unfortunate consequence of knowing lots of words. After all, it would be easier to find a particular book in a small library of a few dozen volumes than to locate a book in a large library with thousands of tomes—particularly if the books aren’t well organized. And as we mentioned earlier, older adults are less able to inhibit information that is irrelevant to the task at hand. So maybe all those words sloshing around in one’s head create more interference than would be the case for a smaller vocabulary.

The psychologist Meredith Shafto and her colleagues put this idea to the test by asking adults from ages eighteen to eighty-eight to identify real words when given word and nonword pairs, which is one way to assess vocabulary. The participants were also given a task designed to measure word-finding ability through the induction of tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states. As expected, the older subjects had larger vocabularies than the younger ones. In addition, the older adults also experienced more TOT states. But a closer inspection of the results yields a more complex picture. As the vocabularies of the younger adults increased, so did the number of TOT states. However, for the older adults, as their vocabulary size increased, the number of TOT states decreased. It seems, therefore, that the larger vocabularies of older adults can serve as a compensatory mechanism for word-finding difficulties.²¹

Researchers have also used vocabulary size to see if it might predict people developing cognitive impairment. Older adults in Japan were assessed for signs of mild cognitive impairment (MCI). They were also asked to write and to talk about a happy event. Based on their clinical scores, the participants were classified as either cognitively unimpaired or as having MCI. Although the written versions of the happy events did not differ between the two groups, the spoken versions did. Specifically, participants classified as experiencing MCI used a more extensive vocabulary. The authors suggested that individuals with MCI employ larger vocabularies to compensate for their cognitive deterioration. Describing an event to another person must be done in real time. Those experiencing MCI tried to mask their impairment with their garrulousness. In the writing task, with as much time as they wanted to craft a response, the task was less taxing, and no such compensation was necessary.²²

Vocabulary size, therefore, is one area where older adults consistently outperform their younger counterparts. This is encouraging, since a larger vocabulary can help offset the changes in cognitive processing that lead to slower word-naming and word-finding abilities.

Verbal Fluency

Here’s a test for you: how many words starting with the letter f can you say out loud in one minute? If you give this a try, you might begin with a rapid-fire stream-of-consciousness recitation of words like “father,” “February,” “fantastic,” “fox,” and “four” and then find yourself mentally ransacking specific categories, such as occupations (“florist, “firefighter,” “foreman”) or mental states (“fear,” “frustration,” “fury”). Like a wildcatter searching for oil, you might quickly abandon any wellhead that is becoming less productive and move on to fields that appear more promising. If you are a younger or middle-aged adult, you can probably rattle off forty or so words in sixty seconds.23

What might seem like an exercise in trivia turns out to be an important technique for studying peoples’ ability to retrieve linguistic information. Although ostensibly a memory task, letter fluency is thought to involve higher-order cognitive processes like inhibition (“the word ‘phone’ doesn’t begin with an f, so I shouldn’t say it”) and self-monitoring (“February starts with an f, but I’ve already said it”).²⁴ Tasks of this kind often use the letters f, a, and s because most English speakers are easily able to think of words beginning with those letters. For that reason, the letter fluency task is sometimes called the FAS test (not to be confused with foreign accent syndrome, which we described earlier). A variant of this task is the category task, in which people are prompted to name all the animals, fruits, or vegetables that they can think of in one minute. Because the animal category is frequently employed, this task is usually referred to as the animal-naming test.

Taken together, tests of letter fluency and category fluency are tests of verbal fluency. Researchers often use them as screening devices to identify individuals who may have suffered some form of brain injury, such as stroke. Verbal fluency tasks can also identify individuals with some other form of cognitive impairment, such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease. These tests have often been conceptualized as measures of executive function, which involves planning and search strategies.²⁵ In contrast, other researchers have concluded that verbal fluency performance is more closely tied to processing speed.²⁶ The most recent research on this topic, however, suggests that verbal fluency is best conceptualized as a measure of language processing.²⁷

What factors are related to verbal fluency in adults without cognitive impairment? Once again, level of education is one of the strongest predictors of high performance.²⁸ People with more education tend to have larger vocabularies and consequently possess a larger pool of candidates to draw on as they attempt to recall words beginning with a particular letter.

Does one’s age affect verbal fluency? That question is harder to answer, because factors like age and education are often correlated. Since younger adults tend to have more years of formal education, it is difficult to untangle the relative contributions of these two factors. Consequently, the results of this research are mixed. Some studies of verbal fluency have found an effect for education, but not for age,²⁹ whereas others have found an effect for age, but not for education.³⁰ And in at least one study, older adults outperformed younger adults.³¹ The psychologist Danielle Barry and her colleagues combined the results of 134 previous studies to assess the relation between fluency, age, and education more precisely. The researchers found effects for both education (the more years of schooling, the better the performance on the task) and age (younger people perform better than older).³²

Performance on verbal fluency tasks also depends on the type of task. Although the impact of age on verbal fluency is mixed when researchers employ the FAS test, a more consistent trend appears when the participants are asked to name as many animals as they can think of. In studies that use this measure of fluency, older adults typically perform more poorly than younger adults. Although the letter and category tests may seem quite similar, some researchers have suggested that different brain regions are responsible for performance on the two tasks.³³

But what does a decline in verbal fluency really mean? The puzzling pattern of results across studies, as well as the fact that performance varies by type of test, suggests that the full story may be even more complex. For example, expertise plays a role in verbal fluency performance. Competitive Scrabble players, who frequently attempt to find words beginning with particular letters, do very well on the letter test. They outperform age-matched control participants who do not play Scrabble. However, when given the animal-naming task, which is unrelated to playing Scrabble, the experts were no better than their peers.³⁴

Taking things one step farther, Michael Ramscar and his colleagues have argued that what appear to be declines in the verbal fluency of older adults might be better thought of as the consequence of higher levels of knowledge.³⁵ Simply put, the more you know, the harder it is to find what you’re looking for. This would explain why older adults consistently perform less well on category tasks: they have large vocabularies of extraneous words to sort through. This may be less of an issue for letter tasks like the FAS, since older adults have access to more word candidates or particular expertise that comes from playing games like Scrabble. It is controversial to claim that cognitive decline due to age is a myth, as Ramscar and his colleagues have. However, their research underscores that what may appear to be cognitive decline could result from other factors, some of which may be beneficial depending on the context. For verbal fluency, a lot of knowledge may be a dangerous thing, but overall, isn’t that a good problem to have?

Grammatical Complexity

Grammar is to a writer what anatomy is to a sculptor or the scales to a musician. You may loathe it, it may bore you, but nothing will replace it, and once mastered it will support you like a rock.

—Beatrice Joy Chute (1913–1987)

During their first years of life, children progress from expressing themselves with simple one-words utterances (“Juice!”) to two-word constructions (“More juice!”) to more complex sentences (“I would like some more orange juice, please”—if you happen to have a very polite child). Sentences become longer as people get older, and they also become more grammatically complex. In languages like English, a principal way in which complexity increases is by the number of clauses that are embedded in a sentence.

Linguists differentiate between left-branching and right-branching clauses. In a left-branching clause, the hearer has to remember the first part of the sentence to make sense of the last part. An example might be “The juice that was bought yesterday and left on the counter until this morning is now in the refrigerator.” In this case, the subject of the sentence (“juice”) must be kept in working memory until the end of the sentence is reached—assuming you’d like to know where the juice can be found, anyway.

In contrast, right-branching sentences are easier to process. This is because the subject and verb are both in the first clause. Compare the earlier sentence with its right-branching equivalent: “The juice that is now in the refrigerator was bought yesterday and left on the counter until this morning.”

Given that working-memory constraints can be problematic for older adults, we might expect to see a decline in grammatical complexity with age. Susan Kemper and Aaron Sumner explored this possibility by asking both college-aged and older adults (average age: 76) to talk for about five minutes about an interesting life experience or an influential person in their lives. These monologues were transcribed and scored to measure sentence length and grammatical complexity. They found that the older adults’ sentences were about 30 percent shorter than those spoken by the younger adults. In addition, the older adults’ grammatical complexity was about a half point lower on an eight-point scale. The researchers also assessed the participants’ working memory and found that, for both groups, the better the memory, the more complex the grammar.36

In another study from Kemper’s lab, younger and older adults were given sentence stems to memorize. The stems varied in grammatical complexity: some were of the more complex left-branching variety (“What Billy found”) whereas others were the easier right-branching type (“Robert ordered that”). The task of the participants was to provide a full sentence using the stem. When younger adults were given right-branching stems to complete, their sentences were longer and more varied than when provided left-branching stems. Older adults, however, showed no difference in sentence length or grammatical complexity in completing the two stem types; they seemed to be operating at the limits of their working memory in both cases. In addition, compared to the younger participants, the older subjects were slower and made more errors when given the more taxing left-branching stems. Once again, these results suggest a working-memory limitation for the older participants.³⁷

Later research by Kemper and her colleagues attempted to determine when an age-related decline in grammatical complexity might become apparent. They asked a group of healthy older adults to provide samples of their spoken language on an annual basis for up to fifteen years. When the grammatical complexity of the participants’ language use was plotted, the researchers found relative stability up to about age seventy-five, and then a fairly large drop, with further declines continuing over time.³⁸

Marilyn Nippold and her collaborators also assessed the complexity of speech produced by participants in their twenties, forties, and sixties, but with a twist. To get a baseline of their speech patterns, participants were recorded as they engaged in a relatively unstructured conversation with an experimenter. Then, after listening to descriptions of situations that involved interpersonal conflict, they described the conflict and gave ideas about how it could be resolved. The researchers found no difference in grammatical complexity among the three groups. However, all groups showed more complexity in their grammar for the natural conversations. Conversely, grammatical complexity declined for all groups when asked to discuss conflict.³⁹

Fermín Moscoso del Prado Martín explored how grammatical complexity interacts with vocabulary, sex, and aging. He analyzed a corpus of telephone conversations and found age-related differences over time in grammatical complexity for men and women. Moscoso del Prado Martín found that the diversity of the grammatical forms used by men increases more steeply than it does for women—but only up to about age forty-five, when it falls off again. The diversity of syntactic forms for women showed a steadier increase and a more gradual decline over time. (Note that the oldest speaker in his sample was only sixty-seven.)⁴⁰

Grammatical complexity therefore appears to differ based on a variety of factors, such as age, gender, and topic of conversation, to name but three. Beneath such variability, however, may be two underlying constants: grammatical complexity appears to be constrained by the limits of working memory and by executive function.⁴¹

However, Moscoso del Prado Martín sounded a note of caution, which applies more broadly than to just his study. He pointed out that the changes he observed, while real, did not correspond to any observed difficulties in the communicative abilities of the participants.⁴²

If declines in working memory and executive function are the primary reason for the changes in grammatical complexity, then we would expect to see more rapid declines in grammatical complexity among individuals diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease (AD).⁴³ And we do.⁴⁴ However, although sentence fragments become more common as AD progresses, the fragments themselves remain fairly grammatical.⁴⁵ Researchers have also observed the same preservation of grammaticality in the written sentences of individuals suspected of having AD.⁴⁶

In sum, grammatical complexity may have a “ceiling” based on the limits of working memory and executive function.⁴⁷ Tasks that strain these two cognitive processes appear to result in shorter, less grammatically complex sentences. That said, older adults have had a lifetime to become more skilled communicators and have acquired a great deal of world knowledge and a large vocabulary. Therefore subtle declines in grammatical complexity may not be particularly noticeable outside the laboratory and probably do not interfere with everyday communication.

Off-Topic Verbosity

My liege, and madam, to expostulate

What majesty should be, what duty is,

Why day is day, night night, and time is time,

Were nothing but to waste night, day and time.

Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,

And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,

I will be brief: your noble son is mad:

Mad call I it; for, to define true madness,

What is’t but to be nothing else but mad?

But let that go.

—Polonius, Shakespeare's Hamlet, act 2, scene 2

The humorous story may be spun out to great length, and may wander around as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular.

—Mark Twain, How to Tell a Story (1897)

After Polonius’s long-winded delivery, is it any wonder that Gertrude responds by exclaiming, “More matter, with less art”? And haven’t we all been trapped in similar situations, listening to a discursive monologue and wishing the speaker would finally get to the point? Of course, people can be verbose and rambling at any age, but older adults seem particularly liable to drift off topic and to engage in lengthy digressions. This is referred to as off-topic speech or off-topic verbosity (OTV).

An essential criterion for designating speech as off topic is that it wanders away from the original subject. The psychologist Dolores Pushkar and her colleagues, who were among the first to study the phenomenon, describe it as “a prolonged series of loosely associated recollections, increasingly remote from, relatively unconstrained by, and irrelevant to the present [context].”48 They conducted life history interviews with Canadian army veterans of World War II (average age: 65). They found that nearly 20 percent could be classified as “extreme talkers” who produced substantial amounts of off-topic speech. Later research confirmed that OTV is not a matter of sheer garrulousness: the talkativeness and OTV of the veterans were shown to be independent factors, with age predicting OTV but not talkativeness.⁴⁹

Older adults are not the only ones who wander away from the main point of what they are talking about, of course; younger adults may be just as guilty as their grandparents. A study by Guila Glosser and Toni Deser, however, found that older adults performed more poorly on measures of global connectedness in comparison to middle-aged participants. This was true even though performance for the two groups was comparable for grammatical complexity and lexical mistakes.⁵⁰ As we have seen, one must take care when comparing younger and older adults. A longitudinal study tracking the same older participants found that verbosity was a relatively stable attribute of their speech over time. However, only fifteen months separated the two assessments, so we don’t know what might happen over longer periods.⁵¹

Psychologists have several competing theories about the cause of OTV. One is that as adults get older, they are simply less able to keep task-irrelevant information from intruding into their thoughts and speech.⁵² However, studies have also shown that such off-topic verbosity is task dependent. Lori James and her colleagues asked participants to describe pictures instead of answering open-ended autobiographical questions. The older adults did not produce any more OTV than their younger counterparts.⁵³ If the underlying issue were simply a matter of reduced inhibition, then the researchers should have found comparable levels of OTV for the two tasks.

Does off-topic verbosity have any real-world implications? It could be the case, for example, that younger adults tend to discount such rambling and perceive older adults as less credible. In simulated courtroom contexts, Elizabeth Brimacombe and her colleagues compared the eyewitness testimony of younger adults (average age: 20) and two groups of older adults: younger seniors (average age: 68) and older seniors (average age: 79). In one study, participants watched a video of money being stolen from a wallet. When asked to describe what happened, a third of the older seniors produced off-topic speech. This included personal experiences that were not relevant to describing the theft. None of the younger seniors or younger adults did this. However, these tangential comments occurred only when the older seniors were describing contexts that were familiar to them (one version of the video had been recorded at their own senior center). This finding suggests that the meandering testimony resulted from reduced inhibition, since the familiar contexts could trigger irrelevant memories of prior experiences in the locations that appeared in the video. Fortunately, however, the off-topic speech was not held against them. A different group of undergraduates, who watched videos of all three groups giving testimony, rated the three groups of participants as equally credible.⁵⁴ (We should note, however, that other studies have found older eyewitnesses to be less believable.⁵⁵)

Of course, judgments about what is on or off topic are subjective by definition. In the James study mentioned earlier, younger and older adults seemed to have different standards for what constitutes OTV: “Older adults adopt communicative goals that emphasize the significance of life experiences rather than conciseness in their personal narratives.”⁵⁶ When life experiences are valued, it becomes more acceptable to inject personally relevant observations into a conversation about a different topic.⁵⁷ The communicative goals and preferences of younger and older adults may differ as well. Dunja Trunk and Lise Abrams found that younger adults had distinct preferences for how different communicative goals should be expressed. Older adults were more tolerant of diverse expressive styles.⁵⁸

In addition, there may be different degrees of OTV. At one end of the spectrum, “disruptive topic shifts,” accompanied by speech that also includes aborted phrases, repetitions, and empty phrases, have been observed in older adults with dementia.⁵⁹ At the other end of the spectrum, autobiographical stories that have an internal coherence but are only tangentially related to the topic at hand may be nothing more than an older adult’s desire to tell a good yarn.

Although being on the receiving end of OTV can be a frustrating experience, the production of off-topic speech has other implications as well. When younger adults hear such meandering dialogue, it can evoke negative stereotypes about the elderly.⁶⁰ We return to the topic of negative stereotypes in the next chapter.

Just one more thing: off-topic productions don’t necessarily mean the speaker doesn’t have a larger goal in mind. The fictional homicide detective Columbo, played on TV by Peter Falk, told seemingly irrelevant stories that actually ensnared the guilty. In short, pertinence is in the eye (or ear) of the beholder.⁶¹

Telling Stories

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

—Philip Pullman

Humans have told stories to each other for thousands of years. Before the advent of widespread literacy, the oral transmission of stories was a primary form of entertainment and instruction. Some of these stories have been preserved as folktales or epic poems and can be quite lengthy, running to thousands of lines. Storytelling thus exemplifies a complex cognitive task, placing great demands on short-term, working, and long-term memory. To offset this cognitive load, storytellers have used mnemonic aids to assist them. These include the repetition of certain phrases, such as the many instances of “swift-footed Achilles” in the Iliad, as well as metrical lines with rhyming couplets, used by English poets and dramatists like Shakespeare. When Hamlet exclaims, “The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king,” the word “thing” serves as a retrieval cue for “king.” Of course, most of us can’t write like Shakespeare, but we all tell stories of one type or another. What happens to the storytelling ability of people as they grow older?

As might be expected, age-related declines in working memory seem to exact a toll on several aspects of older adults’ storytelling abilities. Susan Kemper and her colleagues asked participants (age range: 60–90) to “tell us a story—a made up story like you might tell a child.… You could decide to retell a familiar story or make one up from scratch.”62 The researchers then analyzed these personal and fantasy narratives in terms of their narrative structure, grammatical complexity, content, and cohesion (in other words, how well the parts of a narrative are linked to one another). Participants in their eighties produced narratives that were more structurally complex than those provided by participants in their sixties. (More structurally complex stories had more causally connected elements, or they included a coda or a moral.) However, the older group’s sentences were less grammatically complex and less cohesive. The researchers suggested that this pattern reflects declines in working memory. However, the increase in structural complexity may be due to deliberate choices made by the older adults to provide information about a story’s setting and the narrator’s personal opinions about the tale they were telling.⁶³

Experiments comparing college students to older adults also suggest differences in storytelling. In one study, when asked to retell a story, older adults produced narratives that were more integrative or interpretive than those told by the undergraduates.⁶⁴ Nonetheless, both younger and older participants recalled stories with similar degrees of accuracy.⁶⁵ Younger and older adults also agreed on what constitutes a good story, probably because they possess a similar, albeit implicit, understanding of story quality.⁶⁶

Does a lifetime of experience telling stories lead to better storytelling? Some evidence points in that direction. Kemper and her colleagues found that judges characterized the stories of older adults (age range: 60–92) to be more clear and interesting than those produced by younger adults (age range: 18–28).⁶⁷ A similar study by Michael Pratt and Susan Robins found that the personal narratives of older participants were perceived to be of higher quality than the productions of younger subjects.⁶⁸

Why are older adults better storytellers? Nancy Mergler and her collaborators asked college students to recall sections of prose that had been recorded by three groups of people: peers (aged 20 and 21), middle-aged adults (40 and 49), and older adults (67 and 82). The students remembered more of the incidental details in the segments recorded by the older adults, and when the passages were stories, the students evaluated the older speakers more favorably than the other narrators. However, this was not the case when the passage was simply a descriptive one. The researchers speculate that the physical characteristics of the voices of older people “lead to more effective oral transmission.”⁶⁹ In addition, the difference in favorability ratings suggests that people have expectations about receiving particular kinds of information from older people. Older adults tend to speak more slowly and may alter their pitch and rhythm in ways that add interest to what they are saying.⁷⁰ Finally, such effects may reflect a conscious attempt by older adults to make stories as entertaining as possible, as opposed to being objectively accurate.⁷¹ Or perhaps the experiment evoked memories in the participants of being read to by their parents and grandparents when they were younger!

Although a storyteller is just one person, people often tell stories together. For example, a couple at a dinner party might relate an amusing anecdote to the other guests, with each partner taking turns, or perhaps interrupting each other to fill in important details or provide an alternate version of events. A study that compared how younger and older couples cope with the demands of collaborative storytelling found few differences between the age groups. With regard to the amount of information recalled, older male participants recalled less than the younger adults, whereas older women did not. The reasons for this difference are unclear. In addition, the study found no difference in the ability of older and younger adults to tell stories collaboratively. They tell them just as well with people they know as they do with new acquaintances.⁷²

Differences in collaborative storytelling become more apparent, however, in the ways in which couples tell their stories. For example, in a study where couples were asked to discuss a vacation, older couples talked more about people and places, while younger couples talked more about their itinerary. In addition, older couples tended to tell different parts of the story individually—taking over from each other as the topic shifted. Younger couples interacted more with each other and told all parts of the story together.73 In a similar vein, older couples also appear to do well in tasks of collaborative problem solving.⁷⁴

Since older couples seem to work well together telling stories and solving problems, working with a partner might be another way to help compensate for any age-related declines in cognitive ability.⁷⁵ It seems, therefore, that two heads really are better than one.

Notes

1. Boundaries in ambiguous sentences: Margaret M. Kjelgaard, Debra A. Titone, and Arthur Wingfield, “The Influence of Prosodic Structure on the Interpretation of Temporary Syntactic Ambiguity by Young and Elderly Listeners,” Experimental Aging Research 25, no. 3 (1999): 187–207.

2. To make their decisions: Ken J. Hoyte, Hiram Brownell, and Arthur Wingfield, “Components of Speech Prosody and Their Use in Detection of Syntactic Structure by Older Adults,” Experimental Aging Research 35, no. 1 (2009): 129–151.

3. Some nonnative speakers: Angela N. Burda et al., “Age and Understanding Speakers with Spanish or Taiwanese Accents,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 97, no. 1 (2003): 11–20.

4. Older adults with normal hearing: Sandra Gordon-Salant et al., “Perception of Contrastive Bi-syllabic Lexical Stress in Unaccented and Accented Words by Younger and Older Listeners,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 139, no. 3 (2016): 1132–1148.

5. Both younger and older adults: Alejandrina Cristia et al., “Linguistic Processing of Accented Speech across the Lifespan,” Frontiers in Psychology 3, no. 479 (2012): 1–15.

6. To understand them: Alexandra Jesse and Esther Janse, “Audiovisual Benefit for Recognition of Speech Presented with Single-Talker Noise in Older Listeners,” Language and Cognitive Processes 27, nos. 7–8 (2012): 1167–1191.

7. “Remarkably poor”: Raymond S. Nickerson and Marilyn Jager Adams, “Long-Term Memory for a Common Object,” Cognitive Psychology 11, no. 3 (1979): 288.

8. Characters on keyboard: Alan D. Castel, Meenely Nazarian, and Adam B. Blake, “Attention and Incidental Memory in Everyday Settings,” in The Handbook of Attention, ed. Jonathan M. Fawcett, Evan F. Risko, and Alan Kingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 463–483.

9. Impaired their spelling ability: Larry L. Jacoby and Ann Hollingshead, “Reading Student Essays May Be Hazardous to Your Spelling: Effects of Reading Incorrectly and Correctly Spelled Words,” Canadian Journal of Psychology 44, no. 3 (1990): 345–358.

10. Spelling ability also declined: Larry L. Jacoby, “Memory Observed and Memory Unobserved,” in Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory, ed. Ulric Neisser and Eugene Winograd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 145–192.

11. “Hazardous to your spelling”: Jacoby and Hollingshead, “Reading Student Essays May Be Hazardous.”

12. On par with college-aged students: Donald G. MacKay, Lise Abrams, and Manissa J. Pedroza, “Aging on the Input versus Output Side: Theoretical Implications of Age-Linked Asymmetries between Detecting versus Retrieving Orthographic Information,” Psychology and Aging 14, no. 1 (1999): 3–17.

13. Participants in their sixties: Lise Abrams, Meagan T. Farrell, and Sara J. Margolin, “Older Adults’ Detection of Misspellings during Reading,” Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 65B, no. 6 (2010): 680–683.

14. “Anathema” and “obsequious”: Francis T. Durso and Wendelyn J. Shore, “Partial Knowledge of Word Meanings,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 120, no. 2 (1991): 190–202.

15. Speaker of English: Robin Goulden, Paul Nation, and John Read, “How Large Can a Receptive Vocabulary Be?” Applied Linguistics 11, no. 4 (1990): 356.

16. Via online sources: Kathryn Zickuhr et al., “Younger Americans’ Reading and Library Habits,” Pew Internet and American Life Project, October 23, 2012, http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2012/10/23/younger-americans-reading-and-library-habits.

17. Younger and older participants: Ryan P. Bowles and Timothy A. Salthouse, “Vocabulary Test Format and Differential Relations to Age,” Psychology and Aging 23, no. 2 (2008): 366–376.

18. Over 21,000 words: Eugene B. Zechmeister et al., “Growth of a Functionally Important Lexicon,” Journal of Reading Behavior 27, no. 2 (1995): 201–212.

19. “Lifetime of word usage”: Gitit Kavé and Vered Halamish, “Doubly Blessed: Older Adults Know More Vocabulary and Know Better What They Know,” Psychology and Aging 30, no. 1 (2015): 72.

20. Short-term and working memory: Joshua K. Hartshorne and Laura T. Germine, “When Does Cognitive Functioning Peak? The Asynchronous Rise and Fall of Different Cognitive Abilities across the Life Span,” Psychological Science 26, no. 4 (2015): 433–443.

21. Word-finding difficulties: Meredith A. Shafto et al., “Age-Related Increases in Verbal Knowledge Are Not Associated with Word Finding Problems in the Cam-CAN Cohort: What You Know Won’t Hurt You,” Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 72, no. 1 (2018): 100–106.

22. No such compensation was necessary: Eiji Aramaki et al., “Vocabulary Size in Speech May Be an Early Indicator of Cognitive Impairment,” PloS One 11, no. 5 (2016): 1–13.

23. In sixty seconds: Tom N. Tombaugh, Jean Kozak, and Laura Rees, “Normative Data Stratified by Age and Education for Two Measures of Verbal Fluency: FAS and Animal Naming,” Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology 14, no. 2 (1999): 167–177.

24. “I’ve already said it”: Janet Patterson, “Verbal Fluency,” in Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology, vol. 4, ed. Jeffrey S. Kreutzer, John DeLuca, and Bruce Caplan (New York: Springer, 2011), 2603–2605.

25. Planning and search strategies: Julie D. Henry and John R. Crawford, “A Meta-analytic Review of Verbal Fluency Performance following Focal Cortical Lesions,” Neuropsychology 18, no. 2 (2004): 284–295.

26. Tied to processing speed: Joan McDowd et al., “Understanding Verbal Fluency in Healthy Aging, Alzheimer’s Disease, and Parkinson’s Disease,” Neuropsychology 25, no. 2 (2011): 210–225.

27. Measure of language processing: Douglas M. Whiteside et al., “Verbal Fluency: Language or Executive Function Measure?” Applied Neuropsychology: Adult 23, no. 1 (2016): 29–34.

28. Predictors of high performance: Tombaugh et al., “Normative Data Stratified by Age.”

29. But not for age: Karen I. Bolla et al., “Predictors of Verbal Fluency (FAS) in the Healthy Elderly,” Journal of Clinical Psychology 46, no. 5 (1990): 623–628.

30. But not for education: Adam M. Brickman et al., “Category and Letter Verbal Fluency across the Adult Lifespan: Relationship to EEG Theta Power,” Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology 20, no. 5 (2005): 561–573.

31. Outperformed younger adults: Sara J. Czaja et al., “Examining Age Differences in Performance of a Complex Information Search and Retrieval Task,” Psychology and Aging 16, no. 4 (2001): 564–579.

32. Perform better than older: Danielle Barry, Marsha E. Bates, and Erich Labouvie, “FAS and CFL Forms of Verbal Fluency Differ in Difficulty: A Meta-analytic Study,” Applied Neuropsychology 15, no. 2 (2008): 97–106.

33. On the two tasks: Brickman et al., “Category and letter Verbal Fluency.”.

34. No better than their peers: Ian S. Hargreaves et al., “How a Hobby Can Shape Cognition: Visual Word Recognition in Competitive Scrabble Players,” Memory and Cognition 40, no. 1 (2012): 1–7.

35. Higher levels of knowledge: Michael Ramscar et al., “The Myth of Cognitive Decline: Non-linear Dynamics of Lifelong Learning,” Topics in Cognitive Science 6, no. 1 (2014): 5–42.

36. The more complex the grammar: Susan Kemper and Aaron Sumner, “The Structure of Verbal Abilities in Young and Older Adults,” Psychology and Aging 16, no. 2 (2001): 312–322.

37. Limitation for the older participants: Susan Kemper, Ruth E. Herman, and Chiung-Ju Liu, “Sentence Production by Young and Older Adults in Controlled Contexts,” Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 59, no. 5 (2004): P220–P224.

38. Declines continuing over time: Susan Kemper, Marilyn Thompson, and Janet Marquis, “Longitudinal Change in Language Production: Effects of Aging and Dementia on Grammatical Complexity and Semantic Content,” Psychology and Aging 16, no. 4 (2001): 600–614.

39. Declined for all groups: Marilyn A. Nippold, Paige M. Cramond, and Christine Hayward-Mayhew, “Spoken Language Production in Adults: Examining Age-Related Differences in Syntactic Complexity,” Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics 28, no. 3 (2014): 195–207.

40. Only sixty-seven: Fermín Moscoso del Prado Martín, “Vocabulary, Grammar, Sex, and Aging,” Cognitive Science 41, no. 4 (2017): 950–975.

41. And by executive function: Susan Kemper, “Memory and Executive Function: Language Production in Late Life,” in Language Development: The Lifespan Perspective, ed. Annette Gerstenberg and Anja Voeste (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015), 59–76.

42. Abilities of the participants: Moscoso del Prado Martín, “Vocabulary, Grammar, Sex.”

43. Alzheimer’s disease (AD): Alan D. Baddeley et al., “The Decline of Working Memory in Alzheimer’s Disease: A Longitudinal Study,” Brain 114, no. 6 (1991): 2521–2542.

44. And we do: Kemper et al., “Longitudinal Change.”.

45. Remain fairly grammatical: Kelly Lyons et al., “Oral Language and Alzheimer’s Disease: A Reduction in Syntactic Complexity,” Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition 1, no. 4 (1994): 271–281.

46. Suspected of having AD: Susan Kemper et al., “On the Preservation of Syntax in Alzheimer’s Disease: Evidence from Written Sentences,” Archives of Neurology 50, no. 1 (1993): 81–86.

47. Working memory and executive function: Kemper, “Memory and Executive Function,” 63.

48. Dolores Gold et al., “Measurement and Correlates of Verbosity in Elderly People,” Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences 43, no. 2 (1988): 27.

49. But not talkativeness: Dolores Pushkar Gold et al., “Off-Target Verbosity and Talkativeness in Elderly People,” Canadian Journal on Aging 12, no. 1 (1993): 67–77.

50. Lexical mistakes: Guila Glosser and Toni Deser, “A Comparison of Changes in Macrolinguistic and Microlinguistic Aspects of Discourse Production in Normal Aging,” Journal of Gerontology 47, no. 4 (1992): 266–272.

51. Over longer periods: Dolores Pushkar Gold and Tannis Y. Arbuckle, “A Longitudinal Study of Off-Target Verbosity,” Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 50, no. 6 (1995): 307–315.

52. Their thoughts and speech: Tannis Y. Arbuckle and Dolores Pushkar Gold, “Aging, Inhibition, and Verbosity,” Journal of Gerontology 48, no. 5 (1993): 225–232.

53. Their younger counterparts: Lori E. James et al., “Production and Perception of ‘Verbosity’ in Younger and Older Adults,” Psychology and Aging 13, no. 3 (1998): 355–367.

54. As equally credible: C. A. Brimacombe et al., “Perceptions of Older Adult Eyewitnesses: Will You Believe Me When I’m 64?” Law and Human Behavior 27, no. 5 (2003): 507–522.

55. To be less believable: C. A. Brimacombe et al., “Is Age Irrelevant? Perceptions of Young and Old Adult Eyewitnesses,” Law and Human Behavior 21, no. 6 (1997): 619–634; Sheree T. Kwong See, Hunter G. Hoffman, and Tammy L. Wood, “Perceptions of an Old Female Eyewitness: Is the Older Eyewitness Believable?” Psychology and Aging 16, no. 2 (2001): 346–350.

56. James et al., “Production and Perception,” 355.

57. About a different topic: Elizabeth A. L. Stine-Morrow, Matthew C. Shake, and Soo Rim Noh, “Language and Communication,” in Aging in America, vol. 1, ed. John C. Cavanaugh and Christine K. Cavanaugh (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Perspectives, 2010), 56–78.

58. Diverse expressive styles: Dunja L. Trunk and Lise Abrams, “Do Younger and Older Adults’ Communicative Goals Influence Off-Topic Speech in Autobiographical Narratives?” Psychology and Aging 24, no. 2 (2009): 324–377.

59. Older adults with dementia: Katinka Dijkstra et al., “Conversational Coherence: Discourse Analysis of Older Adults with and without Dementia,” Journal of Neurolinguistics 17, no. 4 (2004): 276.

60. Stereotypes about the elderly: Janet B. Ruscher and Megan M. Hurley, “Off-Target Verbosity Evokes Negative Stereotypes of Older Adults,” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 19, no. 1 (2000): 141–149.

61. Ear of the beholder: Richard M. Roberts and Roger J. Kreuz, “Nonstandard Discourse and Its Coherence,” Discourse Processes 16, no. 4 (1993): 451–464.

62. Susan Kemper et al., “Telling Stories: The Structure of Adults’ Narratives,” European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 2, no. 3 (1991): 208.

63. Tale they were telling: Kemper et al., “Telling Stories.”

64. Told by the undergraduates: Cynthia Adams et al., “Adult Age Group Differences in Story Recall Style,” Journal of Gerontology 45, no. 1 (1990): P17–P27.

65. Similar degrees of accuracy: Danielle K. Davis, Nicole Alea, and Susan Bluck, “The Difference between Right and Wrong: Accuracy of Older and Younger Adults’ Story Recall,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 12, no. 9 (2015): 10861–10885.

66. Understanding of story quality: Jacqueline M. Baron and Susan Bluck, “That Was a Good Story! Preliminary Construction of the Perceived Story Quality Index,” Discourse Processes 48, no. 2 (2011): 93–118.

67. Ages eighteen to twenty-eight: Susan Kemper et al., “Life-Span Changes to Adults’ Language: Effects of Memory and Genre,” Applied Psycholinguistics 10, no. 1 (1989): 49–66.

68. Productions of younger subjects: Michael W. Pratt and Susan L. Robins, “That’s the Way It Was: Age Differences in the Structure and Quality of Adults’ Personal Narratives,” Discourse Processes 14, no. 1 (1991): 73–85.

69. “More effective oral transmission”: Nancy L. Mergler, Marion Faust, and Michael D. Goldstein, “Storytelling as an Age-Dependent Skill: Oral Recall of Orally Presented Stories,” International Journal of Aging and Human Development 20, no. 3 (1985): 205.

70. What they are saying: Arthur A. Wingfield and Elizabeth A. L. Stine-Morrow, “Language and Speech,” in Handbook of Cognitive Aging, 2nd ed., ed. Fergus I. M. Craik and Timothy A. Salthouse (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2000), 359–416.

71. Being objectively accurate: Roger A. Dixon and Odette N. Gould, “Adults Telling and Retelling Stories Collaboratively,” in Interactive Minds: Life-Span Perspectives on the Social Foundation of Cognition, ed. Paul B. Baltes and Ursula M. Staudinger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 221–241.

72. With new acquaintances: Odette N. Gould et al., “Collaborative Recall in Married and Unacquainted Dyads,” International Journal of Behavioral Development 26, no. 1 (2002): 36–44.

73. All parts of the story together: Odette N. Gould and Roger A. Dixon, “How We Spent Our Vacation: Collaborative Storytelling by Young and Old Adults,” Psychology and Aging 8, no. 1 (1993): 10–17.

74. Collaborative problem solving: Cynthia A. Berg et al., “Task Control and Cognitive Abilities of Self and Spouse in Collaboration in Middle-Aged and Older Couples,” Psychology and Aging 22, no. 3 (2007): 420–427.

75. Declines in cognitive ability: Dixon and Gould, “Adults Telling and Retelling Stories”; Gould and Dixon, “How We Spent Our Vacation”; Gould, Osborn, et al., “Collaborative Recall.”