Introduction: Language, Aging and Multilingualism

While not all of us may be second language learners, or have participated in bilingual education or have lost a foreign language we once knew, we all become old, provided we don't die prematurely. And most of us at some stage in our life are confronted with the fact that our parents, or even our brothers and sisters, become old and with the fact that not all of our relatives and friends remain completely healthy mentally and physically until they die. In this book we want to focus on one aspect: language in aging.

Before going into the relation between language and aging, we need for a moment to stop and think what aging actually is. If we look at pictures of our own great-grandparents, we are likely to see pictures of very old people, the way they look, the way they dress. If we happen to have information on their real age, we will probably find out that those very old people are actually in their late 50s or early 60s. Even your own parents probably looked old when they were that age. In a sense they were older than we are, because in many ways, our healthcare system has led to increased life expectancies and more years in good health. Our attitudes towards aging have changed. There is still respect for old age, but we try to avoid being old, being seen as old or feeling old, as long as we can.

So what is aging? It is a generally accepted position in gerontology nowadays that age is an index variable that doesn't explain anything. It is probably best to define aging as a change on three interacting dimensions: biological, psychological and social. No one is denying that there are physical changes in our body over time, but they have their impact in different ways in different individuals. The risk of mental and physical decline increases more or less with age in the larger population, but strictly speaking grouping of individuals on the basis of age in order to learn more about aging is inappropriate. As we will argue later on, the effects of aging result from an interaction between these three dimensions, and only a part of the changes in one of these three dimensions can actually be compensated for by interventions in the other two dimensions.

Related to these issues is the problem of defining what constitutes normal healthy aging and pathological aging. As will be clarified in various chapters, no instrument is able to make a clear-cut distinction between the two. We take the position that pathology/non-pathology is a scale and that individuals have a position on that scale. As in most research on aging and dementia, we will look mainly at 'clear' cases and avoid the twilight zone in the middle up to a point. Maybe there is a place for language and assessment in that zone: maybe language can serve as an indicator of early dementia. We will present some research that suggests that this may be the case. A particularly difficult area is what has been called depressive dementia, i.e. syndromes that on the behavioral level are similar to degenerative dementia of the Alzheimer type but that are caused by depression and generally reversible. A treatment of that type is beyond the scope of the present book. An overview of research on language from this perspective can be found in Emery (1999).

There are other ways of looking at old age, not as a stage in life in which almost everything is worse than in earlier stages and the emphasis is on decline and on what is missing, but as a stage in its own right, just as childhood is not an incomplete version of adulthood. In this stage other matters become important; there is a different perception of time, work, maybe religion, certainly meaning of life. We can study this stage in itself and look at its inherent characteristics without reference to norms from an earlier stage. The two perspectives, aging as decline and aging as acceptance and fulfillment, lead to totally different questions we may want to answer in our research. While most of the research has been done from the decline perspective, we will argue for a perspective that looks at language and aging from the life-span development. In this perspective language development (or any development) does not stop at age 16 or 18 or whatever ages have been proposed for full language acquisition, but continues to develop over the life span. Due to changes in life, education, jobs, relationships or hobbies, people continue to learn new aspects of their languages. In such a perspective development includes not only growth, but also decline as part of the normal process.

Equally fundamental questions can be asked with respect to what, in this specific context, 'language' is. There is little point in going into this deep philosophical question in the context of the present book, but one needs to take a position on a number of issues in order to discuss the relation between language and aging. Here, language use is seen as very advanced and complex skilled behavior. Skills develop with use, and decline with non-use. The basic skills may be quite resistant to decline, like our abilities to ride a bicycle or swim. Once we've learned them we don't forget the basics. But for doing more advanced things quickly and properly, a lot of exercise is needed. In a way using language is like top sports: it is complex, extremely fast and calls for integration of many different skills. The complex parts of that skill need to be trained regularly to maintain them, otherwise they atrophy and fade, and are difficult to reactivate.

Language is not seen as a separate skill or capacity in our cognitive system. It is linked to and interacts with other subsystems, such as perception, memory and emotion. In the chapters that follow we will try to show how different components of language change over time with aging. Throughout this book, language will be presented as a complex dynamic system, and notions from dynamic systems theory will be used to show how language development across the life span fits in more general theories on development. The main thrust of this approach is that the language system is always changing and that it is always in interaction with other systems and dependent on input and use for maintenance.

The third main issue in the introductory chapters will be the role of memory in language use. Different types of memory play specific roles in language use. Many things have to be remembered in speaking and listening: the setting, the goal of the conversation, characteristics of the interlocutors, the topic, who said what and when. In the production and perception processes, there is temporary storage of outcomes of subprocesses....