Differences in narratives of young and middle-aged adults: What do they tell us?

Research on age tends to focus either on language acquisition in childhood (broken down in great detail into different stages) or on age-related decline and dementia in old age. Little attention is paid to the area in between (roughly 20 to 65 years). When adults in this age range are included, they are often presented as a base line but “are rarely viewed as interesting per se” (Fløgstad & Lanza, 2019, p. 177). They serve as a supposedly homogeneous comparison group with an idealized image of a person with complete language acquisition and flawless speech. This notion is hardly compatible with the lifespan perspective, which includes possible changes in linguistic behavior throughout an adult’s life (cf. Beaman & Buchstaller, 2021). The idea of a complete and full-fledged acquisition of language is challenged by a study by Gagarina et al. (2019a), which focuses on the narrative abilities of adults between the ages of 20 and 35 and shows that their participants do not reach maximum story complexity in narratives.
This leads to the crucial question of how to describe and model the linguistic behavior of adults of different ages. Moreover, we have to consider whether, on such a basis, a comparison between adults and children, respectively older people (as has often been done in the past) is methodologically appropriate.
In line with this underlying question, my presentation will concentrate on the narrative level and will examine the narrative abilities of adults in two age groups and compare them systematically. For this purpose, the MAIN assessment is used, which allows the structured collection of narratives of picture stories and systematically evaluates their macrostructure (cf. Gagarina et al. 2019b). For data collection one hundred adults were asked to tell two stories, each with a different addressee. The participants were divided into two age groups (young adults between 20 and 25 and middle-aged between 45 and 50) and in three languages (Russian, German and Polish). The narratives of each person were analyzed for macrostructure according to the MAIN protocol. This allows for comparisons between languages, addressees, and age groups, which will be focus of the presentation. I will show that there are group mean differences in story complexity scores. In the discussion, I will elaborate on the broader context for interpreting these scores. For this purpose, results from accompanying cognitive tests (which show no significant differences) and pragmatic behaviors will be used. It will be emphasized that the differences found cannot be attributed to age (in the sense of numerical age) alone but to more complex interrelationships, such as life stage, including parenthood. In this sense, a multi-perspective view of language change in adulthood is advocated, leading to the recommendation not to use an idealized basis for comparisons between different groups of adults.

References:
Beaman, K. V., & Buchstaller, I. (2021). Language variation and language change across the lifespan: Theoretical and empirical perspectives from panel studies. Routledge.
Fløgstad, G. N., & Lanza, E. (2019). 15. Language contact across the lifespan. In J. Darquennes, J. C. Salmons, & W. Vandenbussche (Eds.), Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft / Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science (HSK) (pp. 172–184). De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110435351-015
Gagarina, N., Bohnacker, U., & Lindgren, J. (2019a). Macrostructural organization of adults’ oral narrative texts. ZAS Papers in Linguistics, 62, 190–208. https://doi.org/10.21248/zaspil.62.2019.449
Gagarina, N., Klop, D., Kunnari, S., Tantele, K., Välimaa, T., Bohnacker, U., & Walters, J. (2019b). MAIN: Multilingual assessment instrument for narratives–Revised. ZAS Papers in Linguistics, 63,20. https://doi.org/10.21248/zaspil.63.2019.516