17.384, Review: Socioling/Multilingualism: De Bot & Makoni (2005)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-17-384. Sat Feb 04 2006. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 17.384, Review: Socioling/Multilingualism: De Bot & Makoni (2005)

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1)
Date: 01-Feb-2006
From: Liang Chen < chen at uga.edu >
Subject: Language and Aging in Multilingual Contexts 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 04 Feb 2006 04:09:19
From: Liang Chen < chen at uga.edu >
Subject: Language and Aging in Multilingual Contexts 
 

AUTHORS: De Bot, Kees; Makoni, Sinfree
TITLE: Language and Aging in Multilingual Contexts
SERIES: Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
PUBLISHER: Multilingual Matters
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-2704.html 

Liang Chen, University of Georgia.

SYNOPSIS

This book deals with language and aging in multilingual contexts. 
While the three empirical studies reported in the book were not 
conducted within any particular theoretical framework, issues related 
to language and aging were discussed in the general framework of 
Dynamic Systems Theory. The authors strongly recommend a 
multilingual and multicultural perspective toward issues related to 
language and aging, contending that ''[A]s with monolingualism, the 
assumption of mono-culturalism in any society is wrong, and that 
applies to the elderly population as much as it does [to] other 
populations'' (p. 77). The book contains 10 chapters, a preface, and a 
bibliography.

Chapter 1, ''Introduction: Language, Aging and Multilingualism'' (pp. 1-
4), sets the stage for the rest of the book via its discussion of four 
issues: the definition of aging, the definition of language, the role of 
memory in language use, and multilingualism. Aging is seen as ''a 
change on three interacting dimensions: biological, psychological and 
social'' (p. 1). Just as aging is seen as a system in development, so 
language is presented as a complex dynamic system and language 
use is described as a ''very advanced and complex skilled behavior'' 
(p. 2). Multilingualism is defined as ''being proficient to a certain degree 
in more than one language'' (p. 3).

Chapter 2, ''Language and aging: A Dynamic Perspective'' (pp. 5-15), 
first provides a brief introduction to Dynamic Systems Theory (DST), in 
which a dynamic system is defined as ''a system of interacting 
variables that is constantly changing due to interaction with its 
environment and self reorganization'' (p. 5). The authors then suggest 
that DST and DST perspectives on the development of complex 
systems provide a reasonable framework for the study of language 
and language development (particularly language in aging), 
as ''language shows all the characteristics of a dynamic system'' (p. 7). 
If we were to adopt a DST perspective on language and language 
development, several related conclusions would follow. First, 
language development takes place across the life span. Second, 
different levels (i.e., physical, psychological, and social) of change in 
aging form a dynamic and interactive system themselves, and 
language change in aging is a result of such dynamic interactions.

Chapter 3, ''Language and Communication with the Elderly'' (pp. 16-
26) reviews some sociolinguistic research on language used by and in 
conversation with elderly people. The review focuses on three aspects 
of the life setting that relate to language: attitudes towards the elderly 
and aging, changes in communication patterns within and between 
generations, and the use of special registers (''elderspeak'') with 
elderly people. This type of research on language and communication 
with the elderly is important in fostering the use of effective 
communication strategies in interactions with the elderly, and plays a 
role in the perspectives on eldercare. While there is a large body of 
research on language used in interaction with and by elderly people, 
many questions remain unanswered. For example, the ways in which 
cultural differences might affect the evaluation of elderspeak by the 
elderly themselves remains unclear (p. 21), as do the linguistic 
characteristics by which younger generations classify individuals as 
old (p. 22). The chapter ends with a discussion of communication with 
elderly people in multilingual nursing homes, where residents with 
different mother tongues may have limited opportunity to interact in 
their preferred language. As the authors point out, ''a fairly new trend 
in research on aging is geared towards elderly in multilingual settings, 
in particular for elderly in nursing homes in which their preferred 
language may not be spoken to them, either because no one speaks 
it, or because staff and residents speak different languages'' (pp. 25-
26).

Chapter 4, ''Language Use and Language Skills in Healthy and 
pathological Aging'' (pp. 27-43), suggests that a sociolinguistic 
perspective on language and aging be complemented by 
psycholinguistic research on language use and linguistic skills in the 
elderly, and that both approaches take multilingualism into 
consideration. To this end, the chapter focuses on the linguistic 
characteristics of elderly person's language, and reviews research on 
production and perception of language at the phonological, lexical, 
syntactic and pragmatic level in both healthy and cognitively impaired 
elderly people.  Production data from the healthy elderly suggest 
deterioration in verbal fluency and articulation, word finding problems 
in decontextualized tasks, a tendency to avoid using complex 
sentences, and superior narrative skills (though narratives may suffer 
from the elderly person's reduced effectiveness in conveying 
information). Age clearly affects phonological production: there is a 
strong correlation between specific voice characteristics and age. 
Apart from some minor effects (possibly due to task or cognitive and 
physical changes) language comprehension is generally well 
preserved in normal aging. In pathological aging (mainly dementia), 
language production sees decline in word retrieval, grammatical 
complexity, propositional content, and in the use of conversation 
building devices; however, language comprehension at both syntactic 
and discourse levels is well retained. No conclusions can be drawn 
from the meager information on phonological skills (either production 
or perception) in cognitively impaired elderly people.

Chapter 5, ''Resources in Language and Aging'' (pp. 44-59), looks at 
the role of cognitive resources (e.g. memory, attention, speed of 
processing), education, the social and linguistic environment, and 
multilingualism in language use and language development. From a 
DST perspective, all these resources interact within the complex skill 
of language.

Chapter 6, ''Multilingualism, Aging, and Dementia'' (pp. 60-77), argues 
that those conducting research on language in aging should devote 
more attention to multilingual perspectives, and should consider the 
use of multiple languages in the diagnosis and treatment of elderly 
people.

Chapter 7, ''Bilingual Aging in Older African-Americans'' (pp. 78-96), 
reports results from an empirical study on the effects of aging, 
education, working memory, and physical status on verbal and 
category fluency in African-Americans. According to the authors, this 
type of research is significant (both socially and scientifically) for 
several reasons. First, the number of older African-Americans is 
increasing rapidly. Second, elderly African-American people as a 
group are more susceptible to late-life dementia due to their relatively 
low level of education. Third, there is very little research on language 
in aging within this population. Fourth, these types of studies may 
bring insights into the impact of bilingualism on aging. The authors 
take a broad conceptualization of bilingualism, treating the two 
dialects--namely, African-American vernacular English (AAE) and the 
so-called Standard American English (SAE)--as two languages. Fifty-
three African-Americans aged between 46 and 97 were tested on a 
combination of health, cognitive and language measures. Tests 
administered included the Bilingual Aphasia Test, which uses verbal 
and category fluency as language measures; the Digital Span Test, 
which is used to assess attention and working memory; the 
Assessment of Activities of Daily Living, which measures health status; 
and the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), which measures 
mental health. Research participants were assessed in both AAE and 
SAE, although the assessments were conducted separately. Results 
indicated that language performance (narrowly operationalized as 
verbal and category fluency) did not necessarily decline with age, and 
that the performance of the subjects on verbal fluency was better 
when assessed in SAE than in AAE. Results also showed that higher 
levels of education went with higher fluency scores.        

Chapter 8, ''The Effects of Age and Education on Narrative Complexity 
in Older Chinese in the USA'' (pp. 98-117), reports on a study on the 
effects of age and education on grammatical and narrative complexity 
in elderly Chinese. The research participants were twelve Chinese 
people, aged between 63 and 78, who lived in New York City. Among 
them, eleven were born in mainland China, and one was born in New 
York. Researchers elicited two narrative samples from each 
participant by asking them to describe the Cookie Theft Pictures from 
the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination, and to narrate their most 
unforgettable childhood memory. Results indicate that (a) education 
correlates with syntactic complexity but not necessarily with narrative 
complexity, and (b) age is not correlated with narrative complexity, but 
is correlated with syntactic complexity. Because narrative complexity is 
not ''necessarily compounded by education'' (p. 117), the authors 
suggest that narrative assessment might serve as a useful diagnostic 
tool to assess cognitive functioning or impairment.

Chapter 9, ''Language in an Epidemiological Study: The North 
Manhattan Aging Study in New York City'' (pp. 118-132), presents 
raters' judgments of different levels of communicative abilities present 
among African-American, Latino, and Caucasian elderly people in 
North Manhattan. A total of 2,014 elderly people took part in the first 
assessment; 1,381 took part in the second assessment 18 months 
later; and 996 of them took part in the third assessment, which took 
place 36 months after the base assessment. A questionnaire was 
compiled from some widely used protocols in mental testing in aging 
research, and administered to the subjects by trained interviewers. 
These interviewers also rated the communicative abilities of the 
subjects. The interviewers and subjects were matched for race and 
ethnicity. Results suggest that (a) the communicative abilities of the 
elderly people in this study are generally preserved, despite clear 
indication of word finding difficulties in language production; (b) raters' 
judgments about the communicative effectiveness of subjects are 
influenced greatly by the educational status of the subjects, and (c) 
these judgments varied across the three different ethno-racial groups, 
even when the subjects and raters were matched for race and 
ethnicity.

Chapter 10, ''Old and New Perspectives on Language and Aging'' (pp. 
133-144), revisits some of the issues discussed in Chapter 3. It 
examines how changes in language skills and the availability of 
resources interact with changes in the life setting and, more 
particularly, with changes in communication patterns.

CRITICAL EVAULATION

There is an increasing body of literature on age-related changes in 
language use and language skills. The large body of research on 
language and aging, however, ''is dominated by researchers in North 
America'' (p. 60), and is heavily biased toward monolingualism. It is 
often the case that there is not even the slightest suggestion of a role 
for a multilingual perspective.  The studies presented in the book are 
important in several respects. First, it is unclear whether having more 
than one language is an asset or a problem in aging, and to what 
extent. Therefore, the three studies mentioned above, in spite of their 
narrow definition of language skills, may represent an important step 
toward understanding language and aging in diverse bilingual 
populations. In addition, because adequate assessment and 
intervention with aging bilinguals is obstructed by the absence of basic 
information about the effects of normal aging on the bilingual 
condition, the studies reported in the book may provide important 
information regarding service delivery to bilingual elderly people. 
However, these studies are only exploratory in nature and have left 
more questions asked than answered. It is evidently the hope of the 
authors that the book will spark more vigorous studies oriented toward 
multilingual, multi-ethnic, and multicultural perspectives on language in 
aging.

No book can be perfect, and no book can make every reader happy. 
However, the book would make more readers happy if the authors 
had had a clearer idea of the readership in mind. The authors may 
have considered the book as an introductory piece on issues of 
language and age, as seven of the ten chapters are devoted to laying 
out the foundation for the three chapters on empirical studies. 
However, if it is introductory, one might expect that the presentation of 
the literature would be more reader friendly and assume that the 
reader had little background knowledge of the subject. This is clearly 
not the case.  For example, Chapter 3 devotes one section to the 
characteristics of elderspeak and stresses that not all communication 
with elderly people can be placed under the elderspeak label (p. 22).  
However, the chapter does not adequately define elderspeak, leaving 
the uninitiated reader with no idea of its exact characteristics. On 
page 17, a distinction is mentioned between the ''despondent'' elderly 
and the ''Golden Ager'', but the authors neither provided a reference 
for this distinction, nor did they offer any explanation. Uninitiated 
readers would benefit from a step-by-step, clear, and organized 
introduction to the general issues of language and aging in 
multilingual contexts.

On the other hand, the authors may have considered the book as a 
more advanced scholarly work. With this in mind, the readers may feel 
a little disappointed in several regards. First of all, the research 
questions are not always well presented. The three chapters (seven, 
eight, and nine) that report on the empirical studies conducted by the 
authors leave one with the impression that too many questions are 
jammed in there to be solved within the space of a couple of pages of 
writing. Second, the interaction effects between the several variables 
(e.g., education, age, health status, working memory, language skills, 
language background, task formats, and languages in which a task is 
administered) are not always sorted out clearly when the final 
analyses of the data are presented. This is unfortunate, especially 
when the authors take a Dynamic Systems Theory perspective on 
language, thus acknowledging the inherent interactions between 
these variables. How do we know that the difference in language 
performance (e.g., verbal fluency) between people from different age 
groups is related to education, or to age, or to working memory, alone, 
rather than a combination of these factors? The authors leave many 
of these possibilities unaddressed. Another serious flaw occurs in the 
study of elderly bilingual Chinese in chapter eight. While the language 
background of the participants is not explicitly mentioned, it's clear 
that they may speak different dialects of Chinese.  These different 
dialects are mutually unintelligible as far as spoken language is 
concerned. Therefore, the language these elderly Chinese used in 
narration may not have been their first language. Consequently, the 
correlation found between education, syntactic complexity, and 
narrative complexity may not exist, and the results may merely support 
a correlation between syntactic and narrative complexity on the one 
hand and familiarity with or proficiency in the language of narration on 
the other. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Liang Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of 
Communication Sciences and Special Education at the University of 
Georgia. His major research interest is language development across 
life span in diverse contexts.





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