Effects of aging on the production of Russian

Abstract

Two studies compared young and older adults’ production of complex syntactic structures in Russian, a morphologically rich language with free word order. A variety of measures of content, fluency, clause structure, and grammatical form were assessed from oral language samples collected from young adult Russians visiting the United States, from older adults who had recently emigrated to the United States from Russia, and from young and older Russians living in Moscow, Russia. Content and fluency in Russian were associated with Russian vocabulary knowledge and influenced by educational level and knowledge of English and other languages. The production of grammatical forms, including clause structure and word order variation, was associated with digit span, suggesting that working memory limitations affect the use of clause and word order variations in Russian.