As the population is aging faster than ever, the number of elders who have geriatric illness is increasing. As a consequence, many geriatric patients who are suffering illnesses such as cerebral infarction and Alzheimer's disease are shown to acquire ...
As the population is aging faster than ever, the number of elders who have geriatric illness is increasing. As a consequence, many geriatric patients who are suffering illnesses such as cerebral infarction and Alzheimer's disease are shown to acquire linguistic disabilities as their brain damages take place after birth. Thus, they show linguistic characteristics of lack of cohesiveness and deviating from main topics when making speeches. There is no automated criterion in evaluating elders' linguistic abilities for each damage, which makes the assessment process difficult.
Many study on conversation analysis using automated criterion based on conversation tasks for the people over 65 are taking place actively in evaluating effectiveness of spoken language conversations, neuro-linguistics studies have become the popular attentive area recently. However, the number of studies that supports lack of cohesiveness and topic maintenance in conversational characteristics of geriatric patients are not enough; most studies uses CIUs analysis methods in assessing elders' discourse characteristics. Studies regarding topic maintenance are also focused on geriatric patients and thus criteria on average elders are incomplete which makes it hard to evaluate geriatric patients' language level and compare effectiveness of therapeutic interventions.
Thus, the following study was based on forty elders who are 65 years old or older and analyzed five types of narratives (story narrative, procedural discourse, expository discourse, conversational discourse, explanatory discourse) along with some standards (overall number of speech and topic statement rate) and compared them to those of younger ones who are in their 20s. Moreover, the effects of inner factors (such as sex, level of education) on groups within elders are also examined.
Following is the conclusion that is derived through this study.
First, after comparing number of speech for each tasks and average rate of subject statement, those of 20s were higher than those of elders who were 65 years old or older. Except for story narrative and conversational discourse, notable differences existed in three other types of conversations: procedural discourse, expository discourse and explanatory discourse. This reflects that as people age, the number of speech and topic statement rate decrease.
Second, for each conversation types, there were meaningful differences in their overall number of utterance and topic statement rate among groups within elders. For overall number of utterance, procedural discourse was relatively low while explanatory discourse was the highest. For topic statement rate, procedural discourse was high while explanatory discourse was significantly lower relative to other types. This implies that elders tend to be more effective in unaffected discourse situations than structured, restricted circumstances.
Third, among elders, males showed much higher overall number of utterances than females, but did not show much difference in topic statement rate. After examining overall number of utterance and topic statement rate based on education level among the elderly groups, the higher the education level, the higher the topic statement rate and more number of utterance. It is supposed that they could be eloquent and stay on topics as they received higher level of education and their cognitive burdens were less. This implies that when analyzing conversation through using elders' overall number of utterance, the recipients' sex and level of education should be considered as an important factor.
The research divided discourse tasks into five categories and provided elders' average and standard deviance for number of utterance and topic statement rate which are used in spontaneous language sample analysis. Moreover, by looking on which types of language usage are effectively used in discourse types, the necessity of adequate conversation task in language treatment were also provided. Thus, the result of this research is important in that it could be used as a baseline data in evaluating in geriatric patient's utterance and their comparative studies.