Full Description
Language Development: The lifespan perspective generates insights into the central issues of age-dependent language change, focusing especially on the middle and later stages of life. The contributors exploit contemporary and historical longitudinal data, adopting psycholinguistic, corpus linguistic and sociolinguistic approaches. Linguistic changes are discussed against the background of cognitive, somatic and social factors. Bringing the resulting contributions together, the volume aims to resume the discussion of contradictions between the models of change and constancy over an individual's lifespan that have not been sufficiently resolved to date. The volume is intended to serve as an interdisciplinary reference resource for those conducting research on language development and the aging process and as a supplementary course book on language variability and change.
Contents
1. List of abbreviations; 2. Investigating the lifespan perspective (by Gerstenberg, Annette); 3. Disassociating the effects of age from phonetic change: A longitudinal study of formant frequencies (by Reubold, Ulrich); 4. Phonological variation in real time: Patterns of adult linguistic stability and change (by Bowie, David); 5. Language production in late life (by Kemper, Susan); 6. Vocabulary and dementia in six novelists (by Lancashire, Ian); 7. A sociolinguistic perspective on vocabulary richness in a seven-year comparison of older adults (by Gerstenberg, Annette); 8. Age-related variation and language change in Early Modern English (by Nevalainen, Terttu); 9. Lifespan and linguistic awareness: The case of 18th-century Italian autobiographers (by Tomasin, Lorenzo); 10. Tired mind or tired hand?: Linguistic changes in the private letters of a Baltic German nobleman (by Voeste, Anja); 11. Kriegsausbruch, Kriegs Ausbruch, KriegsAusbruch: On the possible connection between linguistic variation and age, based on personal journals from 1892 to 1944 (by Schuster, Britt-Marie); 12. Index
