Photo: Thomas Roese
Having an English class in the afternoon, reading a bedtime story to the grandchildren in the evening and then playing mahjong with friends - it sounds like a relaxing evening in old age, but could also be an intervention plan for older adults with cognitive decline. At least that is what Linguist Prof. Dr. Lihe Huang Lihe Huang suggests. He is a professor at China's Tongji University and specializes in gerontolinguistics - the study of language and aging. He has been utilizing multifaceted disciplinary approaches to conduct fundamental research on linguistic behavior and cognitive pattern of older adults with and without dementia in China. With his team from the “Research Center for Aging, Language and Care”, he is also developing tools to help people preserve language competence and cognitive function in old age. Foreign language learning, language practice such as reading and writing, cognitive tasks such as logic puzzles or strategy games like mahjong are considered particularly promising. In February 2024, Lihe Huang visited the linguist Prof. Dr. Annette Gerstenberg as a Humboldtian in University of Potsdam, who has been studying gerontolinguistics for a long time. She has built up her own text corpus “LangAge”, which contains interviews with older adults and is mostly freely accessible.
“China’s population will age significantly in the coming decades,” the researchers said. This trend poses social challenges. The more older people there are, the more age-related diseases and various disabilities require treatment or care. Alzheimer’s disease or other types of dementia, and Parkinson disease could also be typical diseases of aging in addition to diabetes, pain, and cardiovascular disease. The former affect in particular our language ability, which is Prof. Lihe Huang setting out. “We are monitoring this development from a linguistic perspective and hope to improve the future of an ‘aging China’ through our research.” If it were possible to recognize cognitive decline early by the older adults’s language, they could be helped in the early stages of the disease, in which the progression can be slowed down after in-time intervention.
To do so, the researchers collected and described the typical language abilities of older adults and compared them with those who have cognitive impairments. “We use a so-called multimodal approach to understanding language”, the linguist explained. Phonetics, vocabulary, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and non-verbal expressions are all taken into account. Interviews with the volunteers and their scientific analysis combined to form the Multimodal Geriatric Language Corpus (MCGD) in China, a corpus of audio and video data documenting geriatric language. To build this corpus, the researchers interviewed volunteers aged between 60 and 100. Ideally, the interviews would be conducted multiple at five-year intervals. In the meantime, data totaling 200 hours has been collected.
Data comparison allows conclusions to be drawn about the ways in which Alzheimer’s disease affects our language and our thinking. Many patients often repeat what has been said, and the reality and different levels of speech do not even match. “There is also a real divergence between facial expressions and what is said,” said Lihe Huang. “These findings are consistent with clinical symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, such as thought disturbance, visual-spatial orientation and emotional regulation disorder.”
In the next step, the researchers plan to train Artificial Intelligence with the linguistic markers that can be associated with cognitive impairments. This AI could then, for example, in the form of an app on a smartphone, regularly test older people in conversation to see whether they have an increased risk of Alzheimer’s or another disease and whether they should visit a specialist for a further check-up. “This would not only allow us to recognize diseases earlier than ever before,” said the scientist. “Tests based on linguistic abilities are also much easier and more widespread to implement than the current conventional examinations.” This would be an important tool for the care of older adults, whose proportion of the total population is expected to exceed 30% by 2050 in China and most European countries. For this reason, Lihe Huang and his team are also working on tools for the prevention and treatment of dementia and so on, which are clearly non-pharmacological interventions, i.e. interventions that can be done independent to medication. Various methods for training the brain, especially the regions responsible for language production, are considered promising. “People who talk a lot about their past and activate their memory, or read stories to their grandchildren, also help improve their language skills,” explains the researcher. However, cognitive functions can also be “fostered” by, for example, learning a new language. Therefore, the Research Center for Aging, Language and Care has developed its own training materials for English. These focus less on linguistic structures and rules, but more on simple means of expressing in the new language. “Most importantly, we want to give people the opportunity to tell their life stories in English,” said the linguist.
Gerontolinguistics is still relatively new in China. In other countries, such as the USA or Germany, this topic has been on the agenda for a longer time. That's why communicating with researchers worldwide is also very important for Chinese researchers, as Lihe Huang says. “Data sets that already existed, such as the ‘LangAge corpora’ created by Annette Gerstenberg, inspired us.” He also considers it important to communicate with the global research community on grentolinguistics. Therefore, his research group will participate in the 6th International Conference for Language and Aging Research (CLARe6) in April 2024, which is co-organized by Potsdam University. This scientist has already visited Germany three times, but visited Potsdam for the first time in the winter of 2024 with a scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He hopes to establish a collaboration that benefits both sides.
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Note: The Research Center for Aging, Language, and Care at Tongji University was founded to address issues related to language in aging and the preservation of cognitive abilities in the context of global aging, with a particular focus on China's aging population and the frontiers of aging studies. The Center is among the first independent institutions of its kind in China to adopt multimodal approaches and conduct academic research, personnel training, and social services in the fields of language aging, cognitive decline, and gerontology. The Center also carries out research and development on early diagnosis, cognitive training, disease management and database construction with the help of Artificial Intelligence technology.
Prof. Dr. Lihe Huang’s information can be found at:
https://ageing.tongji.edu.cn/info/1014/1078.htm
This is the English translation with some changes from the original German interview.