Reading and writing habits compensate for aging effects in speech connectedness

Bárbara L C Malcorra; Natália B Mota; Janaina Weissheimer; Lucas P Schilling; Maximiliano A Wilson; Lilian C Hübner

doi:10.1038/s41539-022-00129-8

Reading and writing habits compensate for aging effects in speech connectedness

NPJ Sci Learn. 2022 Jun 8;7(1):13. doi: 10.1038/s41539-022-00129-8.

Authors

Bárbara L C Malcorra^#¹, Natália B Mota^#^{2

3}, Janaina Weissheimer^{4

5}, Lucas P Schilling^{6

7

8}, Maximiliano A Wilson⁹, Lilian C Hübner^{10

5}

Affiliations

¹ School of Humanities, Graduate Course in Linguistics, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil. barbaraluz.malcorra@gmail.com.
² Institute of Psychiatry, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil.
³ Department of Physics, Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), Recife, PE, Brazil.
⁴ Brain Institute, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), Natal, RN, Brazil.
⁵ National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), Brasília, DF, Brazil.
⁶ School of Medicine, Graduate Course in Medicine and Healthy Sciences, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil.
⁷ School of Medicine, Graduate Course in Biomedical Gerontology, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil.
⁸ Brain Institute of Rio Grande do Sul (InsCer), Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil.
⁹ Centre interdisciplinaire de recherche en réadaptation et intégration sociale (CIRRIS), Département de réadaptation, Université Laval, Québec City, QC, Canada.
¹⁰ School of Humanities, Graduate Course in Linguistics, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

We investigate the association of short- and long-range recurrences (speech connectedness) with age, education, and reading and writing habits (RWH) in typical aging using an oral narrative production task. Oral narrative transcriptions were represented as word-graphs to measure short- and long-range recurrences. Speech connectedness was explained by the combination of age, education, and RWH, and the strength of RWH's coefficient reflects the aging effect.