with a good pull

After the age of 70, the difficulty of extracting words increases. This is not a sign of the onset of Alzheimer's disease, but a normal phenomenon of aging. Why does this happen and what do senior lecturers and politicians do to overcome the difficulty?

Zvi Zabri Galileo

Difficulty in retrieving words and names exists at any age. It does increase over the years, but "a significant decline in verbal ability only begins after the age of 70", says Dr. Gatit Kova, from the Department of Education and Psychology at the Open University, who has been researching the relationship between old age and language for several years. Despite the difficulties in retrieval, adults retrieve rarer words than those retrieved by young people, probably due to the wide vocabulary of the adults.

Decrease in retrieval capacity

In the research literature, old age begins at the age of 65. Koha discovered that, at least in the field of language, old age only begins after the age of 70. In one of the studies she conducted, the difficulty in retrieving words was tested, using a test in which the subjects are presented with different pictures and they are required to name the picture (the matching test). Dr. Koha : "We discovered that significant problems in this area only begin after the age of 70 or even 75. From that point on, there seems to be difficulty in retrieving words, even though many complain about it years before.

In another study conducted by Koa, the number of words that 20 to 85-year-olds manage to pull out under time pressure was tested. In these tests, verbal fluency tests, the subjects were asked to say as many words as possible that begin with a certain letter, or as many words that belong to a certain category (for example work tools), in a given period of time. Also in this study, a significant decrease in retrieval ability was discovered as the participants were older.

Two main factors can underlie this decline. Since with age our reactions become slower, it is likely that there will also be a decrease in the rate of word retrieval. On the other hand, it may be a difficulty that is uniquely related to the language field, a difficulty that does not necessarily depend on the time limit.

In another study, 85-20 year olds were asked to tell a story about a picture that showed an event. The subjects could extend or shorten the description as they wished. This research makes it possible to compare the language used by people of different ages, and analyze it in several aspects. For example, it is possible to test the use of different syntactic structures in young and old people. It is also possible to check the use of "empty" words such as "something" or "thing", whose function may be to cover the lack of the appropriate word, or to check the richness of the vocabulary used by the storytellers.

Large vocabulary and slow retrieval of words

Dr. Kova: "Research in the field presents us with a certain paradox. On the one hand, it is clear that as we grow older, we acquire more and more words and thus enrich our vocabulary. We all learn new words and terms throughout our lives. For example, the word 'tsunami'; This word has always existed in Japanese, but it was not known to most Hebrew speakers, except perhaps for a few people who study phenomena related to the weather.

After the terrible tsunami in Southeast Asia, the word tsunami became known and useful to all of us. If so, it is clear that the vocabulary is growing all the time. There are studies that show that adults know more words than young people. On the other hand, when adults are required to retrieve a single word in a structured test that has one correct answer, or to retrieve as many words as possible in a minute, they show greater difficulty than young people, despite the large vocabulary they possess."

"Within the same age group, at any age, those with large vocabularies do better in retrieval tests than those with small vocabularies. If so, why do adults, as a group, have more difficulty than young people? Is the reason for this limiting the number of possible correct answers, or perhaps the time limit?

One way to test this is to let people choose for themselves the words that fit them, and not give them a failing grade if they failed to say the word that the researchers intended. Also, it is desirable that such studies have no time limit. In a study done with two students from the Open University, Keren Samuel-Enoch and Shiri Adib, we asked what kind of words people would choose to use to describe the picture. Will they choose common words, or rather the rarer ones?"

Rare words and an attempt to be precise

"If adults have difficulty in retrieving words, it is likely that they will use common words, because they are the most accessible," Koa explains. "But, since they have a large vocabulary, perhaps more rare words will appear in them. And indeed it turns out that adults have a distinct tendency to pull out such words. And this is surprising, because as mentioned, these are the same people who have difficulty retrieving words in structured tests.

Why does someone who can't remember a word like 'funnel', or says 'a dog's house' instead of 'a kennel' suddenly say a sentence about 'a woman who is drowning in diaphragms', instead of 'a woman who doesn't pay attention'? And it's not that these words, which are rare among young people, are part of the normal dictionary of adults, because we checked that too. We presented the words that the subjects used to other adults, and they also classified these words as rare words.

Another finding that emerges from the analysis of image descriptions is that adults are more likely to correct themselves. For example, in the picture where two children are seen handing cookies to each other in the kitchen, the adults said: 'He is giving a cookie to a girl, to his sister.' Why this correction? It is already a matter of interpretation. Maybe because it's important for adults to be precise and it's not enough to say it's a girl, they want to emphasize that the two are brother and sister. The correction may have been made after the speaker heard himself say the less accurate word.

But it may be that the adults do this because it is simply difficult for them to pull out the word that in their eyes is the most correct. It takes them longer to get to the word they really want to use and along the way they use other related words, which 'pop' first."

Context helps to remember

From a further analysis it became clear that the adults choose to focus on broader issues than those on which the young people focus. For example, instead of focusing on the mother who is shown in the picture, the adults chose to talk about the father who is not in the picture. Thus, the story included words that the young people did not say, for example: an explanation of "turns" (a word that is rarer than those referring to family members) between the parents, a turn that is not shown in the picture but the 78-year-old description referred to it.

If so, one cannot help but ask how very old people continue to serve as active lecturers in the fields of literature, art and of course politics? Koa says: "Adults learn to bypass the difficulty they encounter in the field of memory and language by using context. Many studies show that the biggest differences between young and old arise in tests where it is required to remember a list of unrelated words. When you tell a story and ask people to remember it, that is, when there is a context, the difference between the young and the old is reduced.

There can be several reasons for this. It is possible that the adults are so used to relying on the context, that they cannot do without it and therefore fail to remember the random list, and it is possible that due to the difficulty that adults have in the field of memory, they develop the reliance on the context as a compensatory strategy." Nevertheless, it should be remembered that most of them have very good strategies for dealing with the difficulties in spontaneous speech. In small doses this is a completely normal phenomenon, like the tendency of hair to turn white with age.