This book explores how studies of language and aging can be applied to build an aging-friendly society, drawing on the socio-pragmatic turn in language and aging to examine the perspectives of older adults experiencing aging through a linguistic lens. Research on the phenomenon and mechanisms of language in aging can provide older adults with language training, increase their active aging, and offer improved information communication channels for an aging society, which will bring a series of clinical and social benefits to handle problems in aging and language across the world. This book will be of interest to researchers in linguistics, sociology, gerontology and related fields.
Table of Content
Chapter 1: Introduction: What can Linguistics Do for the Aging World?.- Section 1: Representing Aging Images from Social Media.- Chapter 2: Expanding social interaction through online technology: using social media in vascular dementia.- Chapter 3: Who we are and how others see us: older adults’ images and identities in Chinese news media.- Chapter 4: Pluralities of old age – A study based on online surveys in China and France.- Section 2: Sketching Diverse Interactions in Public Settings.- Chapter 5: Aging patients’ repetition of narrative topics in medical interactions.- Chapter 6: Conversational Behaviours in Clinical Diagnosis: An Empirical Study of Question-answering of Dementia in Alzheimer-Type Patients.- Chapter 7: Older Adults’ Help-Seeking Narration as Multi-modal Text: A Corpus Linguistic Approach to Situated Discourse.- Chapter 8: Exploring citations keyed to persons with dementia: Present and prospect (1993-2023).- Section 3: Promoting Healthy Aging through Language Interventions.- Chapter 9:The role of linguistics in the study of aging populations with dementia.- Chapter 10: Reducing the Effects of Loneliness in the Elderly: Enacting the ‘Principle of Linguistic Gratuity’.- Chapter 11: Language Nutrition in Acquisition, Learning, and Attrition.- Chapter 12: Learning a Lx among Older Adults.
About the author
Lihe Huang is Tenured Professor, Deputy Director of Office of Humanities and Social Sciences, and General Secretary of Research Center for Ageing, Language and Care at Tongji University, China. He has published widely in language aging and multimodal pragmatics and undertaken several research projects granted by different institutions. His current research interest is Gerontolinguistics, i.e. utilizing multifaceted disciplinary approaches to conduct fundamental research on linguistic behavior and cognitive pattern of older adults with dementia in China.
Boyd Davis is Bonnie E. Cone and Graduate Professor Emerita at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA and visiting research professor at Research Center for Ageing, Language and Care at Tongji University, China. Her current work emphasizes two areas: the creation of dementia care scenarios for second language and immigrant healthcare workers as graphics in Mandarin, Vietnamese, Filipino, Latin American Spanish, Haitian Creole and several kinds of English; and the exploration of the use of social robots in activities expanding communication among persons living with dementia