Narrative Speech in the Elderly: Effects of Age and Education on Telling Stories

Abstract

A cross-linguistic study of elderly people's capacity to tell stories in the presence of a pictorial representation is presented; 184 subjects were grouped by age (50-59) and 70-71 years), sex, years of formal education, and language (Catalan, English, French, Galician, and Spanish). Narrative speech was analysed with respect to six variables: story structure; story quality; tangential sentences; descriptive sentences; cohesion links and place deixis. The results show that the ability to understand and tell stories declines with increasing age regardless of language. Education increases capacity to tell stories, but sex has no influence. We conclude that the elderly's capacity to integrate all story elements and to create a mental representation of events and relations between events may be reduced. We suggest that education enhances adults' narrative speech because it improves the metacognitive skills involved in narrative competence.