Microlinguistic processes that contribute to the ability to relay main events: influence of age.

The purpose of the current study was to determine the microlinguistic processes that contribute to picture description in healthy adults across the life span. Two-hundred forty healthy adults were separated into three groups, young (n = 80; 20-39), middle (n = 80; 40-69), and older (n = 80; 70-89). Participants provided language samples in response to two single and two sequential pictures analyzed for total number of words, informativeness, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, and main events.