Why do some skills--like spelling--tend to grow weaker as we grow older while others do not?
The Language of Aging
Athletes past their prime sometimes complain that it's the legs that go first. For writers, it may be the spelling.
Many are remarkably productive in their elder years. The British writer Penelope Fitzgerald, for example, did not publish her first novel until she was 60. By the age of 78, she had published nine novels and three works of nonfiction. George Bernard Shaw produced several plays in his 90s and continued writing until his death at 94. Aging does not appear to affect the fluency of writers or the overall quality of their work.
But recent research suggests that as they get older, even accomplished spellers experience deterioration--not in their ability to recognize a misspelled word, but in their proficiency at producing the correct spelling from memory. This may seem a minor concern, especially with computer spell-check programs eager to help out, but there are broader implications.
Deborah Burke, who has studied aging and cognition for more than two decades, is trying to determine whether spelling deficits in older people may be related to other difficulties with word finding that have been shown to increase with advancing years. "We're trying to find what the mechanism is, what it is that's changing," says Burke, William M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor of Psychology, who has taught and researched at Pomona since 1977. "Older people have greater knowledge than younger adults, and their access to this knowledge, their ability to retrieve their world knowledge, is extremely good. The problem is with retrieving the sounds or spelling of words."
Burke previously studied the vexation known as the tip-of-the-tongue state, a memory lapse that also appears to be more frequent among older people. Another subject she has probed is off-topic verbosity--rambling, seemingly irrelevant speech. A five-year, $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health is funding her current inquiries. She has been receiving grants from the agency regularly since 1980.
"One reason they're giving me this money is they are concerned about older adults' word-finding problems," she says. "This is a cognitive change that older adults worry about. At the macro level, there's no problem; older adults can speak and write coherently. At the micro level, the problem is spelling the word and being able to produce it when they want to."
Understanding these cognitive changes is important in determining the differences between typical and abnormal aging, as well as in finding ways to enhance the intellectual potential of older adults. The gingko biloba packages arrayed across drugstore shelves attest to our fervent desire to maintain mental acuity as we age. "Language is so important in how people assess your cognitive ability," Burke says. "If you're having word-finding problems, if you can't speak fluently, if your speech is irrelevant, people are going to write you off. So it's fundamentally important in whether you're seen as a vibrant, healthy person."
The reported decline in the ability to produce accurate spelling, she says, "is a small effect. It's not as robust a problem as word finding, but it's there. We're doing a study now to see if they're related: Are people who show spelling problems in their 50s, 60s and 70s also people who tend to have word-finding problems?"
Another intriguing question is why some cognitive skills appear to decline with age, while others do not. Expertise may sometimes act as a buffer.
"If you have somebody who's a concert-level pianist or violinist or a master chess player, and they continue to play, what happens to that skill? Does it deteriorate the way some basic cognitive skills do?" asks Burke.
The answer seems to depend on the skill.
The age-related decline in spelling--first reported by Burke's husband, a psychology professor at UCLA--appears unrelated to previous training. Hours spent reading, writing or doing crossword puzzles seem to have no effect. But that may not be the case with other learned skills.
"At least with musicians--pianists, for example--the skill will be maintained in terms of the quality and the speed of performances and so on, as long as the people keep playing," Burke says. "There's also some evidence that emeritus professors retain memory for verbal material in a way that's different from other people. But it's controversial--there's counter evidence to this. The reason I'm so interested in it is the fundamental principle: If you maintain the skill in reading or writing, can you stave off some of the decline? Will you have fewer word-finding problems if you use the language continuously and fluently? And I don't know the answer to that."
Burke's interest in aging and cognition stems in part from its having been an undeveloped area of inquiry in the late 1970s, when she arrived at Pomona. "It was sort of a Cinderella field," she says. She and Leah Light, a Pitzer College psychology professor with a similar interest in the subject, began discussing and collaborating on investigations. Now, she notes, "Aging is red hot. Since the baby boom is aging, there's enormous interest and substantial amounts of money going into it. It's become an absolutely huge field."
Although Burke's research has mostly involved basic rather than applied theory, she believes her work has important implications.
"I think older adults are in some cases reviled in this society. Ageism is permitted in situations where other forms of prejudice would be inconceivable," she says. "So I'm happy to have students work on my research, because you have this multigenerational contact. It's really important."
Students also played a role in one of Burke's previous inquiries into language and aging.
A Canadian study had affirmed the perception that older people ramble off topic more often than younger adults. The study attributed this to a decline in their ability to inhibit irrelevant information in their memory systems. Burke's students questioned this. In their experience, older subjects might talk more, but their speech, rather than sounding irrelevant, often seemed more compelling than that of younger speakers.
In their own study of off-topic speech, Burke and her students found that although older adults did indeed produce more of it, their stories were rated as more interesting and informative than those of younger test subjects. Also, off-topic speech tended to occur more frequently when the older adults were presenting personal narratives, and less so with other types of speech.
One older man, for example, when asked to comment on his education, began with a routine, germane narrative, but digressed into a story about his second-grade teacher. She had buck teeth, the man said, "and when I looked up she scared the daylights out of me." He went on to describe knowing her later as an adult and finding that she "was one of the most wonderful people I'd ever met." He then told of using the experience to show his own children how mistaken and harmful impulsive judgments can be.
The man's story was off topic but--Burke notes--far from irrelevant. "The off-topic speech is not because older people can't control their speech," Burke says. "I think the goal of speech changes as we age, and older adults are more interested in finding significance from their life events. They go off topic because they try to derive this moral significance."
Burke is not oblivious to the personal relevance of some of her research. "Oh man, my thought processes... I can identify every little step downward as it happens," she says, laughing. "And the word-finding problems are driving me crazy. But I do have some idea what to do. Older adults have learned that you just put it out of mind and it's going to pop back ... which is another interesting process. I've proposed some research on this whole process of spontaneous retrieval, where the word just pops into mind at a time when you're doing something else. Now, where does that come from?"
Explaining such anomalies of the intellect is a compelling motivation for Burke.
"The human mind is absolutely incredible," she says. "What interests me is understanding how it works. In particular I'm interested in conscious experience, and how conscious experience is related to all this stuff that's non-conscious. I think of it as having the first floor of a house, and below the first floor you have this huge basement that's non-conscious, and what happens on the first floor is very much influenced by what happens in the basement.
"It's a very challenging problem, understanding how the human mind works."
--Michael Balchunas
