They also completed a speech test while distracted, and took part in tests to understand how well they can suppress irrelevant information. For example, the volunteers were asked to speak when prompted and a computer analysis was used to evaluate how coherent they were. asked two groups of volunteers – a ‘younger’ group made up of people aged between 18 and 30 years old, and an ‘older’ group of people aged over 60 – to perform various speech-related tasks. However, little is known about how thinking skills affect coherence in speech and why this declines in later life. This reduces how effectively they communicate and can have negative effects on their social interactions. Studies suggest that as people get older they find it harder to remain coherent, and become more likely to produce irrelevant or off-topic information when speaking. This is called maintaining coherence during speech. Our results indicate that maintaining coherence in speech becomes more challenging as people age because they accumulate more knowledge but are less able to effectively regulate how it is activated and used.ĭuring a conversation, each person must plan and monitor what they say to make sure it is relevant to the discussion. These factors fully accounted for the age-related coherence deficit. Semantic selection ability predicted coherence, as did level of semantic knowledge and a measure of domain-general executive ability. To test this, we collected 840 speech samples along with measures of executive and semantic ability from 60 young and older adults, using a novel computational method to quantify coherence. We predicted that maintaining coherence relies on effective regulation of activated semantic knowledge about the world, and particularly on the selection of currently relevant semantic representations to drive speech production. The cognitive factors underpinning this decline are poorly understood. The ability to speak coherently is essential for effective communication but declines with age: older people more frequently produce tangential, off-topic speech.
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