Aging and Language: Blog Texts as an Aging Index

要旨

Preceding study claims that one’s language abilities develop over long period of time and improve with age. On the other hand, some study reports that some parts of language abilities, such as grammatical ability, show some decrease in elder people. Since one’s language ability is often shown as the aggregation of multiple human abilities, it is difficult to solely extract his/her language ability out of his/her written texts. This study, thus, analyzes texts by using multiple linguistic measures. The corpora cover school students (children attending primary to junior high school, age 6 to 15 years old), elders (age 50 to over 80 years old), Japanese as the Second Language learners, and a dementia patient (Alzheimer type). As a result, this study shows that the lexical richness decreases, and difficult vocabularies tend to be especially lost from elders. This study also displays the possibility of detecting dementia in its early stage.

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