It was already known that old age causes physical discomfort and has consequences for the mental capacities of people. Research by Amélie la Roi – she will receive her PhD from the University of Groningen (RUG) on 3 May – now shows that the ability to communicate via language is also changing. From the age of 40, people slow down in understanding expressions.
Many expressions can be understood both literally and figuratively. You can interpret walking into the lamp as ‘bumping into a lamp’. But anyone with average knowledge of Dutch understands that it usually means ‘getting caught’.
La Roi’s research shows that from the age of 40, adults become slower in suppressing the literal meanings of expressions, which is necessary to bring out their figurative meaning. In addition, older adults appeared to be slower than young adults in activating the figurative meaning of expressions.
La Roi’s research also shows that both young adults and the elderly use context information to facilitate the processing of figurative expressions – for example, a sentence about a thief before the phrase is caught. This skill remains stable over a period of several years.
Compensate with experience
Older people, however, unlike young adults, really need that context information for the processing of literal sentences, and less for figurative expressions. This is because expressions often form a fixed combination of words.
‘Through experience, your brain automatically completes what needs to follow: bump into the lamp… . Once you realize that it is about the figurative meaning and have suppressed the literal meaning, the processing of the figurative meaning goes quickly, ‘La Roi explains in a press release.
‘It seems that with experience we compensate for what we lose through cognitive decline. That’s a positive message when it comes to aging. ‘
–
You can follow these topics
––
