Increase in Linguistic Complexity in Older Adults During COVID-19

ABSTRACT

The reported psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and related public health measures included a decline in cognitive functioning in older adults. Cognitive functioning is known to correlate with the lexical and syntactic complexity of an individual’s linguistic productions. We examined written narratives from the CoSoWELL corpus (v 1.0), collected from over 1,000 U.S. and Canadian older adults (55+ y.o.) before and during the first year of the pandemic. We expected a decrease in the linguistic complexity of the narratives, given the oft-reported reduction in cognitive functioning associated with COVID-19. Contrary to this expectation, all measures of linguistic complexity showed a steady increase from the pre-pandemic level throughout the first year of the global lockdown. We discuss possible reasons for this boost in light of existing theories of cognition and offer a speculative link between the finding and reports of increased creativity during the pandemic.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/0361073X.2022.2163831

Additional information

Funding

The second author’s contribution was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Development Grant, 430-2019-00851, (Dr Kyröläinen, PI) and AGE-WELL Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Award In Technology and Aging. Additionally, the second and third authors’ contributions were supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnered Research Training Grant, 895-2016-1008, (Dr Gary Libben, PI). The third author’s contribution was also partially supported by the Canada Research Chair (Tier 2; Kuperman, PI), and the CFI Leaders Opportunity Fund (Kuperman, PI). This work was also supported by the Catalyst and COVID-19 funding from the Labarge Centre for Mobility in Aging within the McMaster Institute for Research on Aging at McMaster University, as well as the Future of Canada Project grant from the Wilson Foundation (Kuperman, PI).