Subjective complaints about the language function

With age, many people feel that they have difficulty retrieving words, building lengthy sentences, understanding complex grammar when reading, and understanding when listening to others. However, previous research in the memory domain shows that subjective complaints may not reflect objective reality. In fact, older adults who have memory complaints may have normal memory performance, and vice versa, lack of memory complaints does not necessarily mean high memory performance. 

Together with colleagues from Mental Health Hospital No. 1 named after N. A. Alexeev and Memory Clinic, we investigated whether subjective complaints about the language function also diverge with objective performance. Similarly to findings in the memory domain, the severity of subjective language complaints was only moderately associated with language performance. Relative severity of complaints was more informative: language tasks were more difficult for those participants who had greater complaints about language than memory.

Plain-language summary

"Complaints about Language Performance Not Always Correlated with Objective Cognitive Deficits in the Elderly", IQ.hse.ru

Peer-reviewed publications

Malyutina S., Zabolotskaia A., Savilov V., Syunyakov T., Kurmyshev M., Kurmysheva E., Lobanova I., Osipova N., Karpenko O., Andriushchenko A. Are subjective language complaints in memory clinic patients informative? // Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition. 2023. P. 1-28. http://doi.org/10.1080/13825585.2023.2270209 (В печати)

Related projects

- Language processing in mild cognitive impairment



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