Language development: The lifespan perspective, edited by Annette Gerstenberg and Anja Voeste, is a collection of papers that brings together the subjects of language development and age, with a particular focus on language change in the middle and later stages of the individual lifespan. In keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of the volume, its contributors use historical longitudinal data as well as contemporary methods of inquiry to examine various linguistic sub-fields, adopting psycholinguistic, corpus linguistic, and sociolinguistic approaches.
The book is made up of ten chapters, including an introductory chapter by the editors. The two chapters following this introduction are concerned with language change in public broadcasts. Ulrich Reubold and Jonathan Harrington write about phonetic changes in the broadcasts of British-American radio commentator Alistair Cooke, spanning over 60 years. Reubold and Harrington suggest that Cooke's accent reversion may be related to his shift in attitude towards his American host country. In the next chapter, David Bowie writes about the changing use of sociolinguistically marked variants in publicly broadcast religious sermons spanning over 30 years.
The next three chapters in this volume are concerned with linguistic changes related to normal and pathological aging among older adults. Susan Kemper makes a compelling argument about common negative stereotypes of older adults which result in over- and under- accommodations to aging, the use of elderspeak, and the perception of older adults as off-target and verbose. Next, Ian Lancashire discusses the lexical profiles of three novelists who died with dementia and three ‘healthy’ control writers, and concludes that advanced old age does not necessarily end in dementia. Annette Gerstenberg's chapter reports on a corpus analysis of spoken French based on two series of interviews with 28 older adults, conducted seven years apart. Her research suggests that the reduced use of speech fillers among older adults can be seen as compensation for the increased effort of speaking under the difficult conditions of cognitive and somatic aging processes.
The final four chapters of this volume focus on age-related linguistic changes in writing. Terttu Nevalainen examines variation in the writings of conservative and progressive individuals in the English language community during the 15th and 16th centuries. Assessing linguistic changes and their patterns of diffusion in real-time historical data spanning a 40-year period, Nevalainen argues against making a distinction between generational and communal patterns of language change. Lorenzo Tomasin traces the impact of ideas circulating in the intellectual landscape of 18th century Italy on the concept of a youth-adulthood-maturity progression in Italian literary autobiographies. Anja Voeste presents the results of her case study on the private letters of a Baltic German nobleman to his wife. She reports that the majority of linguistic variation occurred in his middle adulthood, when he was at the height of his career and was experiencing a substantial workload. Finally, Britt-Marie Schuster discusses the possible connection between linguistic variation and age, based on the private journals of Thomas Mann and Harry Graf Kessler from 1892 to 1944.
