JavaScript is not activated in your browser. Please activate JavaScript to use the whole functionality of this website! It would be quite devastating for a journalist like me to lose parts of my vocabulary and not to find it again.
And yet it happens with age. So a mixture of professional curiosity and nervousness brings me to Jana Reifegerste, a woman who is familiar with word-finding difficulties. She is a psycholinguist who researches language processing over the course of the lifespan. In her current project, she is investigating when and why aging affects morphological processing, both in healthy people and those with language-related disorders. The German Research Foundation funds the project, and Reifegerste will be able to test subjects over the next few years - young and old people, students, professionals, and retired people between 18 and Before we begin I have to answer a few personal questions and prove that I am neither demented nor depressive - two conditions that would falsify the test result.
So I draw a cube and a clock, count down in steps of seven, memorize a sentence at the beginning that I have to repeat at the end. The slight discomfort that comes with such an examination disappears and I concentrate on my first task. Language in the healthy aging process has been widely neglected in research although we all know that people can be at a loss for words and at some point experience it ourselves. The language psychologist wants to get to the bottom of word-finding problems in old age.
When do they start? How do they develop? Why do some people struggle more than others? Reifegerste wants to get a comprehensive picture. In addition to the cognitive tests, she therefore also collects personal data about origin, health, education, and occupation as well as reading habits and social behavior.
While the researcher is sitting at the table next to mine recording my questionnaire, I dedicate myself to the experiment. I am reading sequences of letters and decide whether they are actually existing or invented words. That's easy, I think, and still feel comfortable, also with unusual words. It is my profession. In the next task, I have to form the plural of nouns. Here, too, the words come easy. Because of my job, I rarely think about the plural forms of a thing or a person. We laugh.
