Chapter 12 Update - January 2004
The development of language: how language use changes as we get older
While research suggests that we respond to negative emotion less readily as we get older,
new research into the psychology of expressive writing also suggests that we become less
egocentric. James Pennebaker and Lori Stone from the University of Texas at Austin compared
the language used in written or spoken expression by people who had taken part in 32 emotional
disclosure experiments (Pennebaker & Stone, 2003).
As you saw in Chapter 18, these experiments require participants to express how they feel and think
about a recently experienced trauma. Many of the experiments have been conducted by Pennebaker
and his colleagues. Other samples were taken from other studies. Participants were aged 7 to 70.
There were 1925 people in the 15 to 24 year old group, 494 in the 25 to 39 group, 132 in the 40 to 54
group and 62 in the 55 to 69 group. In a follow-up experiment, the researchers also followed the
linguistic development of 10 established, professional writers including Shakespeare, Austen,
Dickens, George Eliot and Wordsworth.
One of the most pronounced differences in young and older authors’ and speakers’ language
development was the use of the first person singular: I. There was a significantly lower tendency to
use ‘I’ in communication in the older groups, suggesting that as people get older, they become more
topic-focused and less self-referential. The same reduction in the use of ‘I’ seen in the experimental
samples is also seen in the samples of fiction studied, particularly in Austen and Wordsworth’s work.
In the older samples, there was also significantly less evidence of referring to other people.
In the younger samples there was a significantly greater reference to other people. Perhaps this
change reflects the possibility that as we grow up, we are much closer to and dependent on other
people and refer to ourselves in terms of others’ behaviour or expectations (such as those of parents
or older siblings).
Older participants in both studies made more use of the future-tense than did the younger ones while
using fewer past-tenses. Conversely, the youngest sample made the greatest use of the past-tense and
least use of the future-tense. Time references (such as day, minute and clock) were more common in
the younger samples whereas the use of words of six letters or more was more common in the older
samples (but not in the works of fiction, perhaps reflecting the probability that professional authors’
vocabulary is already fairly well-developed at the beginning of their writing career).
Although the largest portion of the study was cross-sectional, it suggests that older people’s use
of language differs in significant and interesting ways from that of younger samples.
The most important of these differences is a reduction in the egocentric use of ‘I’ in older people.
Pennebaker, J.W. & Stone, L.D. (2003). Words of wisdom: language use over the life span.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 2, 291-301.