Recent years have seen an upsurge of interest in the psychology of aging, particularly in the area of cognition and aging. Much of the experimental research on cognitive aging has dealt with memory, perhaps because of older adults' proverbial complaints about their memory problems. Relatively little has been published on language in the elderly. However, the overlap in mental operations involved in memory and in language has become clear as cognitive psychologists focus on memory for complex linguistic materials such as texts, and as they develop models of natural language comprehension and production. Within the aging literature, there are findings that implicate age-related changes in language as the source of impairment in other cognitive domains, specifically memory. It has been hypothesized that older adults have decreased ability to understand language and that this deficit in semantic processing is a cause of age-related differences in memory for new information. On the other hand, it has also been hypothesized that memory deficits in old age impair language comprehension and production.

The goals of this book are twofold, to review selected aspects of research on language in old age and to consider the relation between language and memory in old age. Many of us who have contributed to the book come to the study of language after years of research on memory and aging. This fact has influenced our choice of topics. Our emphasis is on those aspects of language that are important for understanding memory in old age and on those aspects of memory that are most heavily involved in language.