Pragmatic and narrative decline in healthy aging: a multilevel assessment of their interplay

IF 2.2 3区医学 Q2 AUDIOLOGY & SPEECH-LANGUAGE PATHOLOGY

Journal of Communication Disorders Pub Date : 2025-11-01 Epub Date: 2025-11-08 DOI:10.1016/j.jcomdis.2025.106593

F. Petriglia , A. Marini , I. Gabbatore , F.M. Bosco

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Introduction

Effective communication in aging is supported by both narrative and pragmatic abilities, which are known to undergo declines in healthy older adults. Traditional language assessments may overlook these changes, especially in multimodal and ecologically valid communicative contexts. This study investigates the structure and interplay of narrative and pragmatic abilities in aging by integrating multilevel discourse analysis and the Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCo).

Methods

Forty-four healthy Italian-speaking old adults aged 65 to 86 years took part in the study. Participants completed a narrative production task based on visual stimuli, analyzed through multilevel discourse analysis to extract measures of productivity, informativeness, and coherence. Pragmatic production was assessed using the ABaCo battery. Two separate Principal Component Analyses (PCAs) identified latent components in narrative and pragmatic domains. Pearson correlations assessed interrelations between these components.

Results

Narrative analysis revealed two components: “Narrative Information Organization Difficulties” (coherence errors, lexical informativeness) and “Narrative Productivity” (word fluency, word count). ABaCo subscales loaded onto a single component, “Communicative-pragmatic efficiency in production”. A significant negative correlation was found between narrative organization difficulties and pragmatic efficiency (r = –.469, p = .001), while no significant correlation emerged between narrative productivity and pragmatic efficiency.

Discussion

Findings support a partially overlapping structure between narrative and pragmatic competence in aging. Pragmatic efficiency relates specifically to lexical informativeness and coherence, rather than raw verbal productivity. This distinction highlights the clinical relevance of multimodal and integrative assessments, such as ABaCo, in identifying early communicative decline. Joint assessment of narrative and pragmatic dimensions offers a comprehensive approach to profiling communicative functioning in aging.

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健康老龄化的实用主义和叙事衰退：对它们相互作用的多层次评估。

导读：老年人有效的沟通是由叙事和语用能力支持的，这两种能力在健康的老年人中都有所下降。传统的语言评估可能会忽略这些变化，特别是在多模态和生态有效的交际环境中。本研究采用多层次语篇分析和ABaCo （Assessment Battery for Communication）相结合的方法，探讨老年人叙事能力和语用能力的结构及其相互作用。方法：44名65 - 86岁的健康意大利语老年人参加了这项研究。参与者完成了一项基于视觉刺激的叙事制作任务，通过多层次话语分析来提取生产力、信息量和连贯性的衡量标准。实际生产评估使用ABaCo电池。两个独立的主成分分析（pca）确定了叙事和语用领域的潜在成分。Pearson相关性评估了这些成分之间的相互关系。结果：叙事分析揭示了两个组成部分：“叙事信息组织困难”（连贯错误、词汇信息性）和“叙事效率”（用词流畅性、字数）。ABaCo子量表加载到单个组件上，“生产中的沟通-实用效率”。叙事组织困难与语用效率呈显著负相关（r = - 0.469, p = .001），而叙事生产力与语用效率无显著相关。讨论：研究结果支持老龄化中叙事能力和语用能力之间部分重叠的结构。语用效率主要与词汇的信息量和连贯性有关，而不是单纯的语言生产力。这一区别突出了多模式和综合评估（如ABaCo）在识别早期沟通能力下降方面的临床相关性。叙述和语用维度的联合评估提供了一种全面的方法来分析老年人的交际功能。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Journal of Communication Disorders AUDIOLOGY & SPEECH-LANGUAGE PATHOLOGY-REHABILITATION

CiteScore

3.30

自引率

5.90%

发文量

审稿时长

>12 weeks

期刊介绍： The Journal of Communication Disorders publishes original articles on topics related to disorders of speech, language and hearing. Authors are encouraged to submit reports of experimental or descriptive investigations (research articles), review articles, tutorials or discussion papers, or letters to the editor ("short communications"). Please note that we do not accept case studies unless they conform to the principles of single-subject experimental design. Special issues are published periodically on timely and clinically relevant topics.