The Role of Linguistics in the Study of Aging Populations with Dementia

Three decades ago, Coupland, Coupland, and Giles noted that older age groups consistently did not feature as a visible social group within the paradigms of sociolinguistics, the social psychology of language … and indeed within the language and communication sciences as a whole (1991: 2). The goal of this chapter is to discuss (a) the role that linguistics has played in identifying the characteristics of communication in the context of dementia, the part language plays in the social construction of aging identities, and (c) the challenges for linguists when we interpret conversational data in the context of dementia or other cognitive impairments associated with aging.