Ergonomics and Aging - Fundamentals and Assessment Tools for Occupational Ergonomics - page 406

respect to criteria, such as knowledge about the conditions of life and its variations, knowledge about strat-
egies of judgment and advice about life matters, knowledge about the contexts of life and their developmen-
tal relations, knowledge about differences in values, goals, and priorities, and knowledge about the relative
indeterminism and unpredictability in life (Baltes et al., 1995; Smith et al., 1994). These studies and others
found age invariance in wisdom (e.g., Smith et al., 1994; Staudinger et al., 1992). One specific characteristic
of wisdom is theory of mind ability. That is, “the ability to attribute independent mental states to self and
others to predict and explain behavior” (Happe et al., 1998, p. 358). Research suggests that theory of mind is
also preserved with age and, moreover, that older adults may have superior theory of mind compared to
younger adults. Hence, while older adults may experience declines on traditional intelligence measures,
particularly those that reflect fluid abilities, they appear to have preserved practical intelligence and wisdom
with which they can compensate.
17.3 Language Production and Comprehension
Communication is an integral aspect of life in general, and the ability to communicate effectively is also
important for many occupations. Verbal communication is particularly important for procuring
employment, as it may be one of the first skills identified by a potential employer in an interview.
Some aspects of communicative ability are stable with age, some decline, and some improve. Vocabulary
levels are fairly stable into adulthood (e.g., Wechsler, 1981), along with several other aspects of language
related to semantic processes, which relate to the meaning of words (Burke and Peters, 1986; Light and
Anderson, 1983; Light et al., 1991). Furthermore, research suggests that aging may be associated with
some communicative gains in oral language production. For example, older adults' descriptions of pic-
tures (James et al., 1998) and autobiographical narratives (James et al., 1998; Pratt and Robins, 1991)
were rated as more interesting and informative than those produced by young adults.
In contrast, older adults frequently report word-finding difficulties and tip of the tongue experi-
ences, especially for proper names (e.g., Ryan et al., 1994). Older adults produce more pronouns
and ambiguous references compared to younger adults (Cooper, 1990; Heller and Dobbs, 1993;
Pratt et al., 1989; Ulatowska et al., 1986), which is thought to reflect their difficulty in retrieving
appropriate nouns (Burke, 1997). An age-related increase in disfluent speech, such as filled pauses,
repetitions, and hesitations may also be related to older adults' word-finding difficulties (Cooper,
1990; Kemper, 1992). In addition, research has shown that older and younger adults use different
strategies to compensate for doing two things at once: speaking while concurrently performing a
second task. Whereas younger adults reduce the length and grammatical complexity of their sen-
tences, older adults reduce their speech rate and increase their disfluencies (Kemper et al., 2003).
These results suggest that job tasks requiring multitasking may exaggerate age-related declines in
language production.
Written communication may be particularly essential for certain professions such as technical writing.
Whereas older adults' writing is more diverse in terms of vocabulary (Bromley, 1991), research has
demonstrated that older adults have a decrement in spelling that is, difficult-to-spell words (MacKay
and Abrams, 1998). Aging is also associated with linguistic declines related to sentence complexity
(Bromley, 1991; Kemper, 1990; Kemper et al., 1989). For example, an analysis of oral and written
language samples revealed an age-associated decline in the mean number of clauses in each sentence,
a general measure of language complexity (Kemper et al., 1989). The decline was not equal across
modalities; there was a 23% decline in oral language samples, compared to a 44% decline in written
samples. Older adults also used a more limited repertoire of syntactic constructions. For example,
older adults produced fewer left-branching clauses in the oral and written samples, for example,
“When I was on my way to work today, I stopped to get a coffee.” These types of grammatical construc-
tions are thought to be more difficult in that they place demands on working memory. Together, these
results suggest that older adults produce writing that is less varied in terms of vocabulary and gramma-
tical complexity.