L

Language: Comprehension Introduction

Allison A. Steen and Elizabeth A. L. Successful execution of language processing

Stine-Morrow components depends to some extent on both men-
University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA tal mechanics, which are vulnerable with aging,
and knowledge, which has potential for
experience-based growth. Given this, it is not
Synonyms surprising that language comprehension can
show dynamic change over the life span. On the
Discourse memory; Language understanding; other hand, there is also growing evidence for the
Text memory; Text processing benefits of language proficiency in building cog-
nitive reserve. In this article, this bidirectional
relationship between aging and language is
reviewed by considering first the way in which
Definition
age-related changes in cognition can influence
language comprehension, and then briefly how
The comprehension of language in the domains of
literacy practices and engagement with language
both written and spoken communication requires
can influence cognition and health in late life.
the decoding of print or acoustic features of
speech to create mental representations of mean-
ing, events, and situations. In spite of the apparent
Effects of Aging on Language
ease with which it accomplished, language com-
Comprehension
prehension is a complex process requiring the
synchronization of a variety of cognitive compo-
Age differences in language comprehension are
nents (e.g., recognizing letters and words,
reflected in the multidirectional effects of age on
accessing and integrating word meanings to rep-
cognition. Declines in mechanics have been con-
resent ideas, and using existing knowledge to
ceptualized in terms of working memory, speed,
develop a representation of implied situations).
and interference control. Recent work has consid-
As such, language comprehension is interwoven
ered the role of interactions between mechanics
with core cognitive mechanisms, which show
and sensory processing. On the other hand,
multidirectional patterns of change as a function
growth in knowledge and literacy skills as a func-
of both primary aging processes and experience.
tion of engagement with reading can be a signif-
icant strength in adulthood. A foundation of
# Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016
N.A. Pachana (ed.), Encyclopedia of Geropsychology,
DOI 10.1007/978-981-287-080-3_220-1
2 Language: Comprehension
domain knowledge allows depth of comprehen-
sion in specialized domains that is almost impos-
sible to achieve in any other way. Importantly,
experience-related growth in knowledge and lit-
eracy skill opens pathways to compensation in
terms of both processing mechanisms and in the
way language input is regulated.
Implications of Age-Related Declines
in Mental Mechanics
Many aspects of language comprehension are
unaffected by variation in mental mechanics and
are well preserved with healthy aging (Thornton
and Light 2006; Wingfield and Stine-Morrow
2000). In fact, older adults with developed literacy
skills generally are at least as efficient as the
young in word recognition and in accessing mean-
ings of individual words. Nor does aging appear to
impair the appreciation of basic sentence structure
(i.e., using syntactic form to determine how the
meanings of individual words are connected to
form ideas). For example, older adults are as
able as the young to quickly infer the particular-
ized meanings of words in context (e.g., that the
“insect” in The insect stung the professor is likely
to be a bee or wasp and not a termite). Aging also
does not impair the ability to distinguish between
grammatical and ungrammatical sentences or to
use syntactic structure to infer semantic focus.
This was demonstrated in a series of studies by
Price and Sanford (2012) who manipulated the
syntactic form of a sentence with clefting so as
to put different elements in the foreground of
attention to examine whether there were age dif-
ferences in using these cues for focus (e.g., The
core idea John lost his daughter can be expressed
with the subject clefted as, It was John who lost
his daughter, which puts the focus on John, or
with the object clefted as, It was his daughter that
John lost, which puts the focus on the daughter).
Reading times were faster for a continuation in
which the grammatical subject was matched to the
focused element (e.g., He had wandered off, in the
former case; and She. . ., in the latter). Older adults
showed strong effects of focus, at least as robust as
those of the younger adults, demonstrating that
they were able to use linguistic structure to mod-
ulate activation of concepts in language
comprehension. Also, in spoken language, older
adults make good use of prosodic contour (i.e., the
temporal patterning and changes in frequency that
are characteristic of natural speech) to recognize
syntactic structure, as well as the differential
emphasis of concepts.
On the other hand, a hallmark of language is
that it is generative, in the sense that we produce
sentences that have never been produced before
and comprehend sentences that we have never
encountered before. Even though aging does not
compromise the ability to use the rules that afford
generativity, these rules allow the construction of
sentences that are very complex so as to tax men-
tal mechanics. Thus, age-related declines in
mechanics may result in comprehension deficits
as the demands of language processing increase.
When older adults meet these demands so as to
show good performance, they do so through the
allocation of extra effort. This has been demon-
strated with a number of methods, including exag-
gerated neural recruitment in imaging, increases
in reading time, and interestingly, with
pupillometry.
It is well established that the pupils dilate with
increased cognitive demands. This phenomenon
has been used to explore age differences in the
effort required to understand syntactically com-
plex sentences (Piquado et al. 2010). The contrast
between subject-relative (e.g., The doctor who
was advised by the plumber went on vacation)
and the more complex object-relative (e.g., The
doctor who advised the plumber went on vaca-
tion) constructions has been well studied. Object-
relative constructions are more difficult to
understand for a number of reasons, including
the violation of canonical subject-verb-object
ordering, and the fact that the agent of the matrix
clause (in this example, the doctor went on vaca-
tion) is also the object of the embedded clause
(i.e., the plumber advised the doctor). Compre-
hension is typically more error prone for object-
relative sentences, especially for older adults.
Piquado et al. (2010) presented younger and
older adults with spoken sentences of these
forms in order to answer comprehension ques-
tions afterwards. They found that for both age
groups, pupil size increased as they listened to
Language: Comprehension
the sentences, especially so when they were trying
to comprehend the object-relative constructions.
Consistent with the idea that syntactic complexity
is more demanding of attention for older adults,
they showed an exaggerated increase in pupil size
when listening to object-relative sentences.
Caplan and colleagues (2011) investigated
speed and accuracy of sentence comprehension
under varying levels of syntactic complexity.
Sentences also varied in plausibility (e.g., It was
the movie that terrified the child because it
showed a monster versus It was the child that
nourished the food in the pantry). Participants
self-paced the presentation word by word, and
reading times were recorded as an online measure
of comprehension as the sentence unfolded. After
each sentence, subjects indicated whether the sen-
tence was plausible or implausible as a measure of
comprehension accuracy. Both younger and older
adults were less able to distinguish plausible and
implausible sentences when they were more syn-
tactically complex, with an exaggeration of this
effect for older adults. To some extent, older
adults also took differentially more time to pro-
cess the syntactically complex forms.
There are competing theories regarding the
nature of declines in mental mechanics and how
these mechanisms affect language processing
with aging. Working memory is the capacity for
mental computation and simultaneous storage of
the products of these computations and is partic-
ularly important for comprehension and learning.
Processing speed, on the other hand, is the effi-
ciency with which these computations are com-
puted. Finally, inhibition is the ability to ignore
contextually irrelevant information. Aging has
been shown to be associated with decreased work-
ing memory capacity, reduced processing speed,
and failure to inhibit, all of which have conse-
quences for language processing.
In the Caplan et al. study, reading time mea-
sures were negatively correlated with both work-
ing memory and processing speed. Borella
et al. (2011) examined the differential impact of
processing speed, inhibition, and working mem-
ory on text comprehension using structural equa-
tion modeling. In this study, processing speed was
measured using the letter and pattern comparison
3
tasks. Working memory measures included
assessments of simultaneous storage and manipu-
lations of verbal and visuospatial information.
Inhibition processes were operationalized using
a number of tasks requiring resistance to interfer-
ence (e.g., intrusions in working memory). Youn-
ger and older adults read a series of narratives
followed by comprehension questions for each
text. These questions were answered under one
of two conditions, text-present or text-absent,
such that the texts were either available when
participants answered the comprehension probes
or not. In addition, half of the comprehension
questions probed specific details from the text
(i.e., facts explicitly stated in the text), and the
other half were inferential in nature (i.e., relying
on inferences necessary for text coherence). The
best-fitting model was one in which the effects of
processing speed and inhibition on text compre-
hension were mediated by working memory, with
working memory as the proximal cause of age
differences in text comprehension. A further
model comparison examining the statistical fit of
this model separately for text-present and text-
absent conditions suggested that age and mechan-
ics accounted for more variance in the text-absent
condition than the text-present condition. Interest-
ingly, age differences in text comprehension were
moderated by condition such that older adults
performed equally as well as the younger adults
when the text was present during the comprehen-
sion probe. Together these results suggest, first,
that working memory is a core cognitive mecha-
nism responsible for age differences in text com-
prehension, but that working memory itself has
dissociable components that contribute to com-
prehension. Second, this study suggests that
demands on working memory from comprehen-
sion are less related to online processing than they
are to the maintenance of information in memory.
Finally, evidence from this study suggests that
age-related differences in text comprehension
may be minimal in typical conditions in everyday
life, in which text is available as it is used for
particular tasks.
There are both negative and potentially posi-
tive implications of inhibition failure for text com-
prehension. In a study by Thomas and Hasher
4 Language: Comprehension
(2012), older and younger adults read stories
containing irrelevant information, cued with a
change in font, and were explicitly told to ignore
this information. Later, subjects were given a
memory task for a short list of words, half of
which were the distracting words from the stories.
Older adults were more disrupted in reading by
the presence of distraction and were also more
likely to recall the distracting words than new
words in the memory task. When participants
were explicitly told that some of the words in the
recall task were from the stories they had just read,
younger adults then recalled more of the
distracting words and even outperformed older
adults in this recall task. Thus, these results are
consistent with the view that younger adults not
only have more efficient inhibition mechanisms
but also have more cognitive control over when to
engage these mechanisms than older adults and
that this plays a role in language comprehension.
Even though older listeners can take good
advance of cues from prosody to distinguish
important and unimportant concepts in speech,
mechanics can place limits on this ability as
well. For instance, pitch accents (i.e., a change in
tone to cue the emphasis of a word or phrase
relative to other words in the text) have been
shown to boost memory in both younger and
older adults (Fraundorf et al. 2012); this is
known as an accent boost. In Fraundorf
et al. (2012), older and younger adults listened to
brief stories that included the mention of two
contrast sets, for example, about some British
and French scientists searching for endangered
monkeys in Malaysia and Indonesia. In the target
sentence that resolved the story, one element of
each contrast set (i.e., British vs. French; Malaysia
vs. Indonesia) was selected (e.g., The French
spotted a monkey in Indonesia). Pitch accent was
systematically manipulated so as to stress one
(e.g., The FRENCH spotted a monkey in
Indonesia, or The French spotted a monkey in
INDONESIA), both (e.g., The FRENCH spotted
a monkey in INDONESIA), or neither element.
Memory was tested with a fill in the blank task
(e.g., The _____ spotted a monkey in ________).
Both younger and older adults showed an accent
boost. However, when both words were
emphasized with a pitch accent, older (but not
younger) adults showed a reduction in the accent
boost, which Fraundorf et al. called the other-
accent penalty. They attributed this other-accent
penalty to the lower working memory capacity of
older adults. The other-accent penalty was also
found for younger adults with relatively low
working memory scores, supporting the idea that
the age differences were due to working memory
declines that limit the ability to focus on multiple
concepts in discourse.
Collectively, this literature suggests that many
aspects of language comprehension are preserved
with aging (e.g., word recognition and basic syn-
tactic and semantic operations). However,
age-related changes in mental mechanics can
impact language comprehension across text type
(sentence, discourse) and modality (print, speech)
in more difficult conditions.
Implications of Age-Related Decline
in Sensory Processing
Whether it involves listening to speech or reading
print, language comprehension depends on the
perception of accurate sensory input. While
word recognition processes are generally auto-
matic among those with well-developed literacy
skills, when the sensory information is unclear,
decoding the surface form can require attentional
resources to the extent that comprehension may be
compromised. In other words, decoding and
semantic processing draw on the same pool of
attentional resources. When the surface form is
clear (e.g., print that is legible and appropriately
sized, speech with well-articulated phonology and
good prosody), decoding is accomplished easily
so that working memory resources can be devoted
to constructing a representation of the meaning.
Challenges to signal fidelity – because of noise in
the environment, deficits in sensory processing, or
a combination of both – can compromise lan-
guage comprehension.
A number of recent studies support these
claims in both the auditory and print domains.
When individuals read text in visual noise (i.e.,
text degradation imposed by embedding the text
in a visually complex environment), patterning of
reading times can be used to show that relatively
Language: Comprehension
more attention is devoted to decoding and rela-
tively less attention is devoted to semantic
processing, which results in poorer memory per-
formance (Gao et al. 2012). Older adults are more
impaired than younger adults at lower levels of
visual noise suggesting that limits on mechanics
exacerbate sensory effects on comprehension.
Similar phenomena have been demonstrated
with speech comprehension. Van Engen and
Peelle (2014) described three sources of acoustic
challenge: within the listener (e.g., hearing loss),
from the environment (e.g., background noise), or
from the speaker (e.g., increase speech rate, pro-
sodic disruptions, unfamiliar dialect). Such acous-
tic challenge decreases the attentional resources
available for higher-level language processes (i.e.,
comprehension of meaning) because they are allo-
cated to lower-level decoding processes. Addi-
tionally, this shift of attentional resources seems
to be moderated by age and working memory
capacity such that those with lower working mem-
ory capacity (e.g., older adults, and younger adults
with lower WM) are more likely to show perfor-
mance deficits when sensory fidelity is
compromised than those with higher working
memory capacities.
Implications of Age-Related Knowledge
Growth
Age affords time for experience, and among
adults with good literacy skills and practices,
preservation or growth of crystallized ability and
print exposure is the norm. This “expertise” can
boost performance in text comprehension through
several different pathways. In fact, among older
adults who have achieved strong literacy skills,
the effects of declines in mental mechanics on
comprehension and memory for text can be neg-
ligible. For example, Payne et al. (2012) showed
the effects of working memory on sentence recall
were only found among older adults with rela-
tively low print exposure (an index of reading
experience). Based on word-by-word reading
times, they also showed that print exposure con-
ferred an advantage in the efficiency of word
recognition processes and was also related to
greater effort allocated to semantic integration
processes. Older adults with higher verbal
5
abilities also have advantages in more efficient
resolution of lexical ambiguities (Stites
et al. 2013) and in using statistical properties of
language to guide parsing (Payne et al. 2014).
Thus, lifelong habits of literacy experience can
help to preserve language processing and compre-
hension so as to trump declines in working
memory.
Domain-specific knowledge can also support
language comprehension processes. Chin and col-
leagues (2015) examined the differential effects of
health-specific domain knowledge and domain-
general verbal ability (measured as vocabulary)
on reading comprehension among older adults.
Participants read sentences that were either related
to health topics or about other topics (but matched
in readability), using a self-paced word-by-word
reading paradigm. Based on reading time patterns,
results showed that verbal ability was related to
increased conceptual integration regardless of
domain, but that health knowledge (controlling
for verbal ability) was specifically related to
increased conceptual integration in health-related
sentences. Thus, domain-specific knowledge had
effects on processing above and beyond that of
verbal ability to support comprehension and
memory for text.
Self-Regulation and Attention
One implication of the effects of mechanics and
crystallized abilities on comprehension is that
there can be wide variation in the way in which
the mental representation of meaning is
constructed as language unfolds. In the early his-
tory of psycholinguistics, the emphasis was on
language competence, how the rules of language
are used in an idealized way to construct the
language representation. Questions about varia-
tion in comprehension as a function of abilities
are ones about performance, how language is
actually understood and interpreted in situ. It
would be a mistake to think about abilities simply
as fuel for the operation of language processing
machinery that operates in an obligatory and uni-
form way (e.g., performance does not simply
reflect incomplete computations defined by com-
petence). Rather, as we have described above, the
nature of the language representation is that it is
6 Language: Comprehension
multifaceted, and these different facets can be
constructed to varying levels of fidelity.
One view of age differences in self-regulation
of language is that older adults show more shallow
or “good enough” processing in comprehending
language. For example, Christianson and col-
leagues (2006) showed that when encountering
sentences with temporary ambiguities, such as
While Anna dressed the baby played in the crib,
both younger and older adults are likely to incor-
rectly answer “yes” to the question, Did Anna
dress the baby? with older adults even more vul-
nerable to this error. According to the “good
enough” account, as the sentence unfolds, the
initial interpretation that Anna dressed the baby
is maintained in memory even after the interpre-
tation that the baby played in the crib is encoded
(in fact, participants are also likely to say that the
baby played in the crib). Christianson et al. argued
that rather deriving meaning strictly based on the
rules of language, we use heuristics to create
meaning representations that are consistent with
world knowledge. Thus, even though the coexis-
tence of these two meanings is not allowed by the
sentence structure, we maintain them because it is
easy to create a mental model of the situation.
Because older adults tend to rely on knowledge-
based heuristics, they are more likely to use such
“good enough” processing.
In fact, language comprehension is often shal-
low. As any middle schooler who has snagged
someone with the problem of the plane crash on
the border between the USA and Canada can tell
you, when you pose the question of where one
should bury the survivors, most people will puzzle
over the border issue without realizing they are
being asked about burying living people.
Daneman et al. (2006) measured eye movements
as younger and older adults read and attempted to
solve problems containing such anomalies
(embedded among problems that did not). There
were no age differences in the probability of notic-
ing the anomalies (i.e., young and old were
equally likely to say that the survivors should
not be buried). Based on the eye movement
record, Daneman et al. concluded that older adults
were actually quicker in detecting the anomalies,
but required more effort (as measured by
rereading) to resolve them.
Collectively, this literature suggests that it is
not that language comprehension is generally
more superficial with age. Rather, that there is a
shift in how resources are allocated among the
different levels of analysis (Stine-Morrow
et al. 2008).
Behavioral research tends to show that older
adults are differentially facilitated in word recog-
nition processes by context in both the auditory
and print modalities. This is particularly interest-
ing in light of findings from electrophysiological
studies suggesting that meaning is slower to come
online for older adults. Event-related brain poten-
tials (ERPs) are a time-sensitive measure of brain
activation in response to a particular stimulus
(e.g., word) widely used to examine online com-
prehension. In particular, the N400 is a negative
ERP component occurring about 400 ms after
stimulus onset. Because its amplitude is very sen-
sitive to the predictability from context, the N400
is taken as an index of very early effects of context
on lexical processing. Younger adults show
reduced N400s for words predictable from the
prior sentence context as well as words that do
not fit the context but are from the same semantic
category (e.g., To make the hotel look more like a
tropical resort, they planted rows of palms/pines).
This is taken as evidence that younger adults
actively predict in language comprehension so
that items related to the target are activated. How-
ever, older adults show only an N400 reduction
for expected endings (e.g., palms). This suggests
that older adults are not using predictive
processing. A recent study examined age differ-
ences in predictive processing by manipulating
constraint and expectancy of sentence final
words. Wlotko and colleagues (2012) measured
the N400 effect for target words preceded by
strong (e.g., At night the old woman locked the
door) and weak (e.g., Mr. Smith enjoyed showing
people his newly installed stereo) sentence con-
text. Although both younger and older adults
showed reduced N400s for expected endings
when contextual constraint was strong, only
younger adults showed reduced N400s for weakly
constrained endings. These results suggest that
Language: Comprehension
although older adults are equally proficient at
conceptual integration (as shown by
age-equivalent performance in the strongly
constraining condition), younger adults are more
likely to use contextual information for predictive
purposes. Collectively, age-comparative studies
using ERPs suggest that older adults (in general)
do not engage in predictive processing in the same
way as younger adults. However, older adults
with high verbal ability show predictive
processing comparable to the young.
The nature of comprehension is that the ideas
given by the text are integrated and interpreted in
light of existing knowledge, but this balance
changes with age to give priority to knowledge-
based interpretation (over direct computation of
meaning). At the same time, the ability to com-
pute the meaning from the text as an integrated
set of ideas is preserved with aging, though the
way in which effort is regulated to achieve this
may change. Older readers have to allocate more
effort to integrate ideas and may engage integra-
tion processes more frequently as they read in
order to offset the demands of integrating larger
segments of text (Stine-Morrow and Payne
2015). To some extent, segmentation itself is a
procedural skill that is intact into very late life,
though integration processes may become less
effective with late-life cognitive declines
(Payne and Stine-Morrow 2016).
Self-regulation, then, plays a large role in the
preservation of language comprehension with
aging. This is seen in both greater reliance on
knowledge-based processing and in text-based
processing that accommodate working memory
limits.
Effects of Language on Aging
An emerging body of literature suggests that over
time a mentally stimulating lifestyle can create
cognitive and neural reserve that may delay
age-related cognitive decline, with some evidence
supporting the idea that language experience may
impact cognitive health.
7
Education, Literacy, and Longevity
There is increasing interest in educational attain-
ment and literacy as predictors of longevity and
cognitive health (Sisco et al. 2015; Spittle
et al. 2015). This body of research has grown in
recent years and has shown that controlling for
demographic factors known to contribute to life
expectancy (e.g., sex, ethnic group, income), edu-
cational attainment is a reliable predictor of life
expectancy, more so than perhaps more obvious
predictors of longevity such as cholesterol level or
frequency of health checkups. According to Spit-
tle et al., if all Americans attained a high school
diploma, annual mortality would be reduced by
about 240,000 persons. However, measures of
educational attainment (e.g., years of formal edu-
cation) are of many varieties and do not take into
account the quality of educational experience. One
hypothesis for why education has such powerful
effects on lifelong cognition is that it is a proxy for
literacy, with evidence that, in fact, print exposure
is a better predictor of cognitive health than educa-
tion level and can delay the onset of dementia.
Language is, of course, important for many
aspects of life in predominantly literate societies
such as in the USA. But perhaps surprisingly,
studies comparing low-literacy adults to those
with well-developed literacy skills have revealed
significant behavioral and anatomical conse-
quences of literacy for cognition and neural sub-
strates, which have the potential to impact late-life
health. Often, with comparisons of high- and
low-literacy samples in the USA, it is difficult to
disentangle the effects of literacy from the social
and economic factors associated with literacy illit-
eracy. However, a number of studies in recent
years have focused on populations in which illit-
eracy is not necessarily a consequence of poverty
or socioeconomic stressors that have their own
significant effects on cognition and health (e.g.,
children in Columbia who were conscripted into
service during civil war at the expense of early
schooling and literacy acquisition; older daugh-
ters in the Algarve region of Portugal, who by
tradition were given childcare responsibilities
while younger siblings went to school to receive
literacy instruction). Such natural experiments
have shown that illiterates have impoverished
8 Language: Comprehension
phonological processing, visual attention, abstract
reasoning, semantic fluency, and memory com-
pared to their literate counterparts. Literacy acqui-
sition also enhances cortical responses to
two-dimensional objects and words and supports
the development of verbal working memory capac-
ity. Furthermore, results from neuroscience
research (e.g., functional and structural imaging)
suggest that literacy reorganizes cortical networks
to change the brain’s response to both spoken and
written language, with greater selectivity of activa-
tion (Huettig and Mishra 2014). However, as
Huettig and Mishra (2014), in most cultures, liter-
acy acquisition is tightly woven with schooling, so
that it is a challenge to disentangle effects of liter-
acy from educational experience more broadly.
Bilingualism
Further evidence for language impacting cogni-
tion is a considerable body of work suggesting
that bilingualism (or even better, multilingualism)
confers advantages for adult cognition. Early
bilinguals (i.e., those who learned a second lan-
guage early in life and continue to use both lan-
guages) show reduced declines on measures of
executive control as they age and show a delay
in the onset of symptoms for dementia (Bialystok
et al. 2012). The roots of these effects are still
being explored, but likely derive from multiple
mechanisms. First, proficiency in a second lan-
guage is enhanced among those with strong skill
in the first language, so it is possible that the
bilingual advantage is grounded in part in early
literacy acquisition. More importantly, in manag-
ing multiple linguistic codes, only one of which is
typically appropriate at a given time, bilinguals
are routinely engaging suppression mechanisms
in ordinary communication. Thus, bilingualism
entails routine practice in attentional control that
may contribute to cognitive health in late life.
Conclusions and Future Directions
Language comprehension is a highly active form
of mental engagement. Older adults with
well-developed literacy skills have a number of
advantages that support comprehension. Word
recognition and use of syntactic cues to guide
semantic processing are largely intact. On the
other hand, there are a number of ways in which
language complexity can tax attentional demands
so as to compromise comprehension.
With the rise of neuroscience, there are provoc-
ative puzzles that arise in reconciling findings
between imaging and behavioral data. For exam-
ple, older adults typically show exaggerated con-
textual facilitation in behavioral data, suggesting
that the build up of message-level semantics can
supporting decoding processing. Electrophysio-
logical data, however, often show the reverse
(e.g., Federmeier et al. 2010), in particular less
predictive processing from sentence context with
age. Thus, it will be important for future work to
develop a theoretical account of age differences in
how different sorts of processes come on line in
language processing, so as to accommodate both
behavioral and neuroscience data.
Literacy is a form of expertise that is often
taken for granted in cognitive aging research,
and adults who have not developed these skills
are typically underrepresented in research sam-
ples. However, a nontrivial proportion of adults
in the USA have literacy skills inadequate to the
demands of everyday life, and they are especially
vulnerable to declines in cognitive health in later
life (National Research Council 2012). More
needs to be known both about the effects of liter-
acy skill as a moderator of cognitive aging and as
potential pathway to resilience.
Cross-References
▶ Age-Related Change in Abilities
▶ Aging and Inhibition
▶ Aging and Language: Production and
Communication
▶ Cognitive Changes: Normal and Age-Related
▶ Cognitive Control and Self-Regulation
▶ Crystallized Intelligence
▶ Intelligence
▶ Knowledge
▶ Language: Naming
▶ Sensory Effects on Cognition in Late Life
▶ Working Memory in Older Age
Language: Comprehension
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