974. How does aging affect our ability to understand language? From the challenges of processing complex sentences to the resilience you get from a rich vocabulary, we look at how our language skills change over time. Plus, looking into why people say "anyways" led me to some interesting historical tidbits.
974. How does aging affect our ability to understand language? From the challenges of processing complex sentences to the resilience you get from a rich vocabulary, we look at how our language skills change over time. Plus, looking into why people say "anyways" led me to some interesting historical tidbits.
The aging segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." A version of the piece originally appeared on Psychology Today, and you can find her at valeriefridland.com.
| Edited transcript with links: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/aging-anyways/transcript
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References for the Aging segment
van Boxtel, W, Lawyer, L. Sentence comprehension in ageing and Alzheimer's disease. Lang Linguist Compass. 2021;e12430.
Payne, B. R., Gao, X., Noh, S. R., Anderson, C. J., & Stine-Morrow, E. A. (2012). The effects of print exposure on sentence processing and memory in older adults: Evidence for efficiency and reserve. Aging, Neuropsychology and Cognition, 19(1–2), 122–149.
Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. This week, I have a fascinating segment about how aging affects the ways we use and understand language — where we fall short as we age and what we can do to give ourselves a leg up and how we can write in ways that are more understandable to people who might be struggling. And then I answer a listener question about the nails-on-the-chalkboard word "anyways" (and its surprising history).
by Valerie Fridland
As if wrinkled skin and stiff joints were not enough reason to dread getting older, research also shows that our cognitive skills decline with age, with potential problems including less efficient processing and reduced memory capacity. This may not be very surprising for people who can’t ever remember where they put their car keys, but what might be surprising is that such declines may also be affecting how well older adults are able to communicate with and understand the people around them.
In their recently published review article, psycholinguists Willem van Boxtel and Laurel Lawyer look at research on the linguistic changes that come with aging. Most of what they look at shows that as our cognitive skills decline with age, we also can have problems understanding longer and more difficult sentences. On the bright side, some research also suggests that this decline can be offset by relying more on semantics than on memory — in other words, what we know about word meaning.
You've probably heard older people say their memory is not what it used to be — or you've said it yourself — and research backs it up. Elderly adults have a harder time forming short-term and episodic memories, and they're also less efficient at things like discriminating between similar memories or at performing such tasks quickly. While these issues affect more than just language, they do affect how quickly people can come up with the right word meanings as well as unpack the meaning of complex sentences.
In particular, older adults appear to have greater loss of what is called working memory (WM).
So, working memory is our ability to remember and manipulate a small chunk of information in an immediate context, as opposed to committing something to our longer-term memory (for example, to remember that information at some later point) or even just holding information in our mind while we jot it down but don’t alter it (which is a different thing called short-term memory).
Working memory is vital for daily tasks like following directions, doing math like addition or subtraction, and working out where we parked the car. But even more crucial, working memory is extremely important in processing what someone is saying in real-time because we have to keep previous words in mind (as we see how a sentence plays out) to understand its meaning. In other words, when someone is talking, listeners use their working memory to store parts of the sentence — like who the subject is and information about the verb — in order to understand what's coming next.
For example, in a sentence like, "The cat the dog chased ran up a tree," you have to hold in working memory both "the cat" and "the dog" as you work out, based on what follows, which is the subject of the main clause so you can understand who ran up the tree. You also have to be able to manipulate and put together the entire sentence structure in working memory to unpack the fact that the cat is also the entity chased by the dog.
Sentences like that put a greater demand on working memory than a sentence like "The cat ran up the tree," because there is no embedded clause in this sentence as there was in the previous one (no "the dog chased"). In short, the more syntactically complex a sentence is, the more it taxes our working memory. This, of course, only becomes a problem if our working memory isn't up to snuff.
As I just said, figuring out who is doing what to whom when hearing a sentence relies greatly on our working memory, so you'd expect that problems with working memory would have some effect on both how fast and how well we can understand what someone is saying.
As an example of how such declines interfere with how people process language, the authors cite a study that found older adults did worse on questions about the content of advertising campaigns as the sentences got longer. When sentences were short (meaning they put less demand on working memory), there was no difference in accuracy between the older and younger adults.
In other studies, people who did worse on working memory tests also did worse on comprehension tasks when the passages they were assigned to read had more complicated sentence structures.
For instance, a sentence where a lot of information was put in an initial clause, such as "If he doesn’t pass this test, the student will fail the semester," requires more working memory than back-loaded sentences like, "The student will fail the semester if he doesn’t pass this test."
In the first example, you have to keep the initial clause in working memory while waiting to see how it will fit in with the verb in the larger sentence structure. In contrast, in the second sentence, the verb comes near the start of the sentence, and the rest just fits into the frame the verb provides since we understand that the verb "to fail" requires something to be failed and that there is usually something causing it. So here, there is less demand on our working memory, and our knowledge about the semantics of the verb helps us unpack the meaning of the sentence.
While everyone, young and old, with lower working memory scores performed worse on such sentences, the fact is that older adults will tend to be on the lower end in working memory scores because of the effects of aging on the brain.
And side note: since everyone, young and old, can struggle with sentences that take a long time to get to the main verb, it's a good idea to minimize them if you want your work to be easily understood by a wide audience.
Besides problems with working memory, other factors might also be at work in the slower uptake and error rates found in aging populations. Another area that differs between older and younger adults is in the domain of what is called "verbal fluency." For instance, when asked to come up with as many names as they can in one minute for a given category (for example, plants or animals), a task requiring them to search through word meanings they know and have stored in memory, older adults generate fewer terms overall and have less range in terms of the words they come up with.
While this might point to a potential impairment, it may also be that living longer just gives you a larger vocabulary, which takes longer to work through when searching for a specific type of word. So, while such results support an argument that semantic access is slower in older adults, it actually does not suggest that older adults are worse at such semantic recall.
In fact, this richer vocabulary and semantic knowledge might be one of the ways that older adults compensate when facing difficulties in other aspects of sentence processing, like detecting grammatical errors.
For example, Van Boxtel and Lawyer discuss a 2019 study that examined how well adults performed on identifying correct subject/verb agreement on made-up verbs (like "I spuffs") in contrast to real verbs (like "I cooks"). Younger speakers were better and faster at detecting agreement errors, but particularly when evaluating the pseudo-verbs, a finding that suggested older adults’ larger store of words might be what’s helping them when they're presented with the real verb cases.
This research also suggests that while our ability to interpret syntactic structures is affected in aging brains, older adults were able to make up for it by relying on their more extensive knowledge of words and word meaning when performing these tasks. In other words, their increased linguistic experience may help make up for age-related declines by providing a rich store of information to draw from — but only when they have a big store of words they can tap for clues.
The silver lining to the litany of cognitive declines adults face as they age is that in healthy older adults, getting a lot of exposure to reading (or being read to) and prior linguistic experience gives them a larger vocabulary that appears to offset some of these losses. A study by Payne et al. (2012) suggests that "print exposure" (in other words, reading experience) not only helps by providing another source of information to draw on when making semantic or syntactic decisions but also might even compensate for declines in people with poor working memory. So, whether it's hardback or an audiobook, get to work building up that store of words in your head. It's about more than impressing your friends with your vocabulary. It may actually help you function better many years in the future.
That segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." A version of the piece originally appeared on Psychology Today, and you can find her at valeriefridland.com.
by Mignon Fogarty
Anabell asked, "Is it correct or incorrect to say 'anyways' to someone? As in 'Anyways, call me later!' 'Anyways' sounds like nails on a chalkboard to me."
Thanks, Anabell!
The standard word is "anyway," which is probably why the sound of "anyways" bothers you so much. "Anyway" has some other uses, but you've probably most likely heard people say it with an S in a sentence like this, where "anyway" is a way of redirecting a conversation back to the topic at hand:
Anyway, we need to get more confetti.
Or maybe in a sentence like this, where "anyway" means something like “regardless”:
Squiggly wasn't supposed to have access to confetti anymore, but Aardvark bought him some anyway.
From comments I see, a lot of people seem to think that people saying "anyways" is relatively new, but the Oxford English Dictionary has citations for "anyways" in any form going all the way back to the 1200s, and in the way we've been talking about going back to 1828.
And I love this quotation from 1927 from a book called "Just Between Us Girls":
Well, anyways, my dear, it simply slayed me.
Today, "anyways" is considered colloquial, and it's part of some American dialects, which means you wouldn’t want to use it in a job application or a school essay, but it’s also common in some regions or communities.
According to Google’s Ngram Viewer, which is a decent measure of how often words appear in edited text, mostly books, there has been a steady rise in the use of "anyways," even in edited text.
However, "anyway" is still vastly more common. In fact, you can barely even see that the use of "anyways" is rising until you remove "anyway" from the chart because it’s so much more popular it swamps out the instances of "anyways."
And what about "any way" — two words? Well, in the two-word phrase, the noun "way" is being modified by the adjective "any." Here’s an example of a sentence where you’d use the two-word version:
Is there any way you could call me later?
Notice how you could substitute another adjective, like "some," in that sentence. You could say,
Is there any way you could call me later?
But you could also say,
Is there some way you could call me later?
Doing that test—can you substitute a different adjective?—can help you figure out whether you want the one-word version of "anyway," or the two-word version: "any" and "way."
And the two-word "any way" leads us to another interesting point. You may have heard that "anyway" can’t take an S because it’s an adverb, but that’s just not true. It’s easy to think of examples that prove it wrong. For example, the adverbs "forwards" and "backwards" are standard in British English (even though we use "forward" and "backward" in American English). "Always" is another adverb that ends with S, and I bet you didn’t know that the adverb "always" was originally two words: "all" and "ways."
The Motivated Grammar blog explains that "anyway" is just like the adverbs "always" and "sometimes," which also started out as two words: "some" and "times." Long ago, English had more words that were something called the adverbial genitive, and some of them—like "always," "sometimes," and "anyways" — took an S.
But because English isn’t consistent or predictable, "always" and "sometimes" kept their S and "anyway" lost it, at least as far as for what people want you to use in Standard English today. But knowing where "anyways" comes from maybe helps explain why it keeps showing up and sounds normal to some people.
That’s some interesting history I didn’t expect to find when I started researching this topic, but your quick and dirty tip is still to use "anyway," and not "anyways," if you want to not have your words sound like nails on a chalkboard to people like Anabell. Thanks for the question!
Finally, I have a familect story.
Hi, Grammar Girl. My name is Eric from Milford, Massachusetts, and I'm calling with a familect. When my now college age child was a toddler while driving around the neighborhood before Halloween, we noticed many houses in the neighborhood decorated for Halloween with lights and other displays. I referred to them as spooky lights, which when repeated by my toddler became pookie lights as in P-O-O-K-I-E. We took great delight in driving around the neighborhood to see the lights. But once Halloween was done and the lights came down, my little one was very upset that there were no more pookie lights to be seen. He thought the lights should be there all the time and didn't understand why they were gone. But once December rolled around and people started putting up winter holiday lights, my toddler was very excited that the pookie lights were back. Not only did we enjoy driving around the neighborhood throughout the holiday season, we also made it part of our Christmas Eve tradition to drive around as much of the neighborhood and surrounding area to look for pookie lights as we could. That Christmas Eve tradition of listening to Christmas carols while driving around looking at pookie lights continued this fall when they came home from college for winter break. Take care.
Thank you so much Eric!
Tell me your familect! That's what we call words used by your family and only your family. You can leave me a voicemail with your story at 83-321-4-GIRL. It’s in the show notes, and be sure to tell me the story behind your familect because that’s always the best part.
And now, if you're a Grammarpalooza subscriber you can also send a voice memo. I send text messages with fun facts a couple of times a week, and you can also ask me questions. It's a great way to support the show and the first two weeks are free. To sign up, visit https://joinsubtext.com/grammar or text "hello" to (917) 540-0876.
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And I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. That's all. Thanks for listening.
References for the aging segment
van Boxtel, W, Lawyer, L. Sentence comprehension in ageing and Alzheimer's disease. Lang Linguist Compass. 2021;e12430.
Payne, B. R., Gao, X., Noh, S. R., Anderson, C. J., & Stine-Morrow, E. A. (2012). The effects of print exposure on sentence processing and memory in older adults: Evidence for efficiency and reserve. Aging, Neuropsychology and Cognition, 19(1–2), 122–149.