The Impact of Aging on Spatial Abilities in Deaf Users of a Sign Language.

Research involving the general population of people who use a spoken language to communicate has demonstrated that older adults experience cognitive and physical changes associated with aging. Notwithstanding the differences in the cognitive processes involved in sign and spoken languages, it is possible that aging can also affect cognitive processing in deaf signers. This research aims to explore the impact of aging on spatial abilities among sign language users. Results showed that younger signers were more accurate than older signers on all spatial tasks. Therefore, the age-related impact on spatial abilities found in the older hearing population can be generalized to the population of signers. Potential implications for sign language production and comprehension are discussed.

• Publication year

  2020

• Venue

  Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education

• Publication date

  2020-11-21

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Linguistics, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1093/deafed/enaa034PMID 33221919
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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