Narratives produced by 69 healthy Italian adults were analyzed for age-related changes of microlinguistic,
macrolinguistic and informative aspects. The participants were divided into five age
groups (20–24, 25–39, 40–59, 60–74, 75–84). One single-picture stimulus and two cartoon
sequences were used to elicit three stories per subject. Age-related differences were found with
respect to semantic paraphasias, paragrammatisms, syntactic complexity, degree of both local
and global coherence, local coherence errors (like ambiguous referencing), and in the level
of informativeness conveyed by the stories. The results showed some null effects of age, some
effects with a sharp drop in performance in the oldest group, and several effects suggesting a
gradual decrease in performance across age groups. No age differences were found with respect
to phonological selection and noun–verb ratio. In the proportion of details vs. main themes, the
results indicated a possibly better story construction ability in the middle aged (40–59) and
young elderly (60–74) groups compared to the younger or the oldest group. Story-type (single
picture vs. picture sequence) had a significant influence on some macrolinguistic and informativeness
measures.
