An Empirical Research On Speech Communication Disorders Of The Elderly

With the continuous advancements in science and technology and the development of medical and health services, the old population coefficient is increasing year by year, and social aging has become an inevitable trend of global social development. An ageing society not only involves in the change of population structure, but also reflects the natural laws of scientific development, social progress and extension of life expectancy.As a huge social group, how to manage the elderly resources is of great significance for the healthy development of an aging society. The human nervous system and body functions may suffer from certain degeneration and functional disorders. After entering aging stage, body functional disorders, cognitive impairment, psychological disorder and other problems among aged people have great impacts on their normal life, especially speech communication ability, whose change has the most significant influences on the physical and mental health of the elderly.In the 21 st century, the most prominent problem in China must be the problem of the elderly. There have been many researches on this issue, but few deal with speech communication disorders of the elderly. Language is the most important tool of communication. Communication via language is the overriding and most basically viability and social act of human beings. It can be said that the existence and development of human society cannot proceed without speech communication activities. However, with the increasing of the age, the old people’s physiological and psychological states would experience a series of changes, resulting in the change of speech communication ability. Due to the changes of physiological characteristics and social role of aged people, they shows remarkable differences in language usage condition compared with other age groups, which even gives rise to language barriers. The elderly’s communication disorders and psychological disorders are increasingly affecting the elderly’s physical and mental health, threatening the stability and harmony of the elderly’s families and their children’s families, and influencing social stability harmony.Therefore, in order to conduct an systematic study of the elderly’s speech communication disorders, this paper carries out an empirical research on the situation of speech communication among aged people in Jilin Province by way of questionnaire survey. A comprehensive social survey is conducted on six aspects: the elderly’s hearing impairment, cognitive disfunction attitude towards speech communication, speech communication object, mastery of code in speech communication, speech communication ability. To enhance the reliability of those researchs in paper, this paper insists on the combination of theoretical analysis and empirical analysis, conducts an effective questionnaire survey on 491 senior citizens from Jilin Province, and puts the data collected from the investigation into a computer. Then, statistics package for social science(SPSS) is used to perform chi-square test and post hoc test on these data. Finally, the research data are combined with statistical charts in order to draw scientific empirical conclusions.The whole paper consists of ten chapters.The zero chapter is research background part. This chapter mainly introduces the research background. In the research background part, we firstly scientificly define the elderly’s age with the use of four methods of age-based generally used in the scholar. Secondly, we detaily introduce the aging population situation and the futute development trend in aging of our country. Finally, we elaborate the main problems that cause elderly’s speech communication disorders of our country.Chapter 1 presents the literature review. In this chapter, the author sort up the existing relevant studies at home and abroad. Domestic relevant researches mainly focus on the elderly’s speech communication disorders from the perspectives of pathological linguistics, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. Foreign researches mainly focus on such three obstacles: aging with elderly’s speech communication disorders, physical diseases with elderly’s speech communication disorders, social interaction with elderly’s speech communication disorders. These reorganizations and reviews provide theoretical bases for the study in this paper.Chapter 2 introduces the concerns, research significance and research methods. In this chapter, we make a detailed description of the main purpose of the research, academic and social significance of the research, the scope of the survey, questionnaire design, questionnaire issued, and the research and statistical methods.Chapter 3 introduces the elderly’s hearing impairment with speech communication. In this chapter, we mainly conducts a systematic research on the two problems that may result in speech communication disorders among the elderly from the perspective of hearing. First problem we investigate is the hearing loss of the elderly, which contains age of hearing loss of the elderly and the impacts of the hearing loss of the elderly on speech communication, second problem we discuss is the demand of the elderly for volume and speech rate in daily communication. Through research, we find that the majority of the elderly currently exit in the case of hearing loss, the number of hearing loss symptom in the elderly reach to peak between 61 and 65 years old. Although some elderly people deem that hearing loss have affected the normal speech communication, but the majority of the elderly hold the opposed view or reservations; The most elderly people want to take the normal speech rate to communicate with the objects.Chapter 4 presents the elderly’s cognitive impairment with speech communication. In this chapter, we mainly addresses two problems that may affect the elderly’s speech communication from the perspective of cognitive impairment of the elderly. First problem we address is the hypomnesis of the elderly, which contains hypomnesis situation and its impacts on the speech communication of the elderly. Second problem we study is the topic repeating state of the elderly, which contains frequency of topic repeating and the reasons for topic repeating of the elderly. Through research, we obstain the such research reaults: the hypomnesis of the majority of the elderly is not serious; the impact of hypomnesis on the speech communication of the elderly is not significant.Chapter 5 is the part of the elderly’s attitude towards Speech Communication. This chapter carries out a detailed investigation on the elderly’s willingness to proactively communicate, conversation attitude, including concerns about conversation attitude and conversation object, attention to respect, preferred role of speech communication, the impacts of social identity on speech communication and attention on communication status from the perspectives of Social Psychology. Through research we find such results: Willingness to proactively communicate of the elderly overall present a downward trend; The most of the elderly more concern about the attitude of conversion objects; The number of the elderly play role in speaker is far more than the number of listener in speech communication.Chapter 6 introduces the speech communication objects of the elderly. By combining questionnaire survey with theoretical analysis, this chapter conducts a systematic study on the age structure of the elderly’s communication objects, the communication gaps of the elderly with different age groups, the preferences of the elderly for different communication objects, and the communication frequency of the elderly with their children. After research we find such results: The daily communication objects of the elderly are mainly middle-aged and older age groups, and the elderly’s communication with youth groups presents a low level; The majority of the elderly think there is communication gap with other age groups; The communication situation between the elderly and their children is far from optimistic, and the most of the elderly have low level of communication frequency with their children.Chapter 7 introduces the elderly’s mastery of code. In this chapter, the author performs an empirical research on the number of languages mastered by the elderly, types of languages mastered, experiences of foreign communication, dialect usage, which contains number and frequency of using dialects, current situation of using catchwords, and mandarin level. After the empirical research, we find such results: The majority of the elderly only master one language; In addition to Chinese, English is mainly used among the elderly; The most of the elderly have never exchanged with foreigners, so the elderly have few experiences of foreign communication.Chapter 8 introduces the speech communication ability of the elderly. This chapter conducts an detailed study on language expression skills of the elderly, the increase or decrease of language expression, variation of daily communication hours, the amount of daily discourse, the common language patterns, the usage of paralanguage, which contains the frequency of using paralanguage and the elderly’s attention to paralanguage, the elderly’s preferences for common speech communication topics, the usage of communication media by the elderly, etc. Through research we find such results: The majority of the elderly are not satisfied with their current language expression skills; The amount of language expression changes insignificantly compared to the past; In daily conversion, the elderly mostly take paragraph as the syntactic form, secondly use the phrase and long single sentences, and lastly use complex sentences and so on.Chapter 9 is Conclusion and Suggestions. This chapter is the generalization of the whole study. It sums up the major findings and conclusions and proposes several suggestions and improvements.In this paper, the author hope to arouse people’s attention to gerontolinguistics and concern for the elderly’s language, improve the elderly’s language environment and provide the theoretical basis for research fields related to gerontology.