GRASP: Greater awareness of social pragmatics in ageing

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The number of older adults are expected to double by 2050, presenting a major challenge for society: ensuring that as our lives are extended, so too is our health and quality of life. One of the most prevalent yet understudied barriers to healthy ageing is communicative decline. In particular, a large segment of the ageing population struggles with pragmatic skills, such as the ability to read between the lines or tailor utterances in partner-specific ways. Given the importance of pragmatic skills for health and life satisfaction, it is critical that the sources of age-related pragmatic decline are identified. Traditionally, researchers have attempted to link pragmatics to cognitive skills, since picturing oneself in another's shoes requires some degree of mental gymnastics. However, the results have been largely inconclusive. GRASP will test an intriguing new theory in psycholinguistics: the idea that social network features (e.g., size and diversity) predict linguistic skills above and beyond cognitive skills. Since recent work shows strong positive and negative associations between network features and language skills, it is an empirical question as to how network features relate to pragmatics and whether a causal relationship exists. By assessing both cognitive and social factors in adults over the lifespan, we will not only come to a better understanding of what underlies pragmatic competence, but also the extent to which different factors are important at different developmental stages. These findings will be used to guide the project's secondary aim: the creation of the first screening tool of pragmatic decline for adults. The tool will provide individuals with immediate knowledge about their communicative health, raising awareness of deficits and accompanying risks, and opening the door to intervention studies aimed at improving communication. Together, this project will lay the groundwork for us to remove communicative barriers to successful ageing.