A Study On Correlation Between Oral Fluency And Aging Of The Elderly

In this study,50 normal older adults were divided into 5 age groups:65-69,70-74,75-79,80-84,and 85+,to examine the performance of normal aging older adults in spoken language fluency and to further explore the association between spoken language fluency and age in older adults.Oral fluency in this study is narrowly defined as oral expression fluency.Combining the previous research results to divide the oral expression fluency measurement index system into two dimensions,temporal index and linguistic index.The temporal index was subdivided into six sub-indicators,including speech rate,articulation rate,phonation-time ratio,mean length of runs,number of silent pauses,and mean length of silent pauses,and the linguistic index was subdivided into five sub-indicators,including filled pauses,mean length of filled pauses,number of repetition,number of revision,and ratio of pruned length to total length.The article uses literature search,interview survey,measurement statistics,and descriptive inductive methods to investigate both objective measures and subjective assessments of older adults’ oral fluency,focusing on the aging correlates of older adults’ oral fluency.Study 1 was an objective measure of oral fluency in older adults,presented as oral expression fluency.The examination of the aging correlates of each indicator revealed that each indicator had a different performance with respect to age differences,but there was an overall trend of decreasing oral expression fluency with increasing age for older adults from 65 to 85 years of age or older.The ANOVA results showed that there were significant differences in the oral fluency scores of older adults across the five age groups.Significant differences existed among the five age groups of older adults in the temporal indicators of speech rate,articulation rate,and mean length of runs,and no significant differences existed in the temporal indicators of phonation-time ratio,number of silent pauses,and mean length of silent pause and linguistic indicators.Study 2 was a subjective perception of older adults’ spoken fluency,presented as perceived spoken fluency.The results showed that in terms of frequency,listeners perceived voiced pauses and silent pauses as the main factors influencing the general population’s evaluation of perceived oral fluency of older adults,followed by speech rate and repetition,with correction being the lowest;the results of stepwise multiple regression analysis showed that correction was positively related to oral fluency,explaining 59.7%of the variability in oral fluency.In terms of the contribution of oral expression fluency indicators to perceived fluency,there was a significant positive relationship between speech rate,ratio of pruned length to total length and perceived fluency,and the amount of variability in perceived fluency explained by both was 43.7%.Combining the results of Study 1 and Study 2,it can be seen that both objective measures of older adults’ oral fluency and subjective perceptions of older adults’ oral fluency show a slow decline with age,and both trends are roughly the same,but the development or performance of both internal characteristics do not show a simple linear decline with age,but a complex,non-linear one:temporal indicators,especially speech rate,have a greater impact on older adults’ oral fluency and show more stable performance;linguistic indicators do not become a significant difference in older adults’oral expression fluency,while some linguistic indicators become significant features in perceived fluency from the listener’s perspective.