Abstract: The study of language aging serves as an important perspective to investigate the human language development and cognitive change, which is also socially and clinically significant to today’s reaction to global population aging. Over the last decade, many Western countries with large elderly populations have initiated many research projects in various aspects of language aging, including cognitive change and language understanding, language production and social interaction, language aging of dementia patients, etc. With the adoption of both linguistic and interdisciplinary methods, these abundant research outputs suggest that the fundamental causes of human language aging include cognitive and physiological aging, neurodegenerative diseases and other health declines. New research projects initiated in China are suggested to foster and build up interdisciplinary research teams, adopt the multimodal corpus approach and collect rich longitudinal data. Additionally, more attention should be paid to the Chinese elders with dementia or other diseases.

Keywords: language development; cognitive change; aging; interdisciplinary; multimodal

摘要： 对老年人语言衰老现象进行研究是人类认识自身语言发展、大脑认知变化的重要方面，在全球老龄化问题日益突出的今天还具有实际的临床意义和重要的社会效益。老龄化程度很高的西方发达国家早已加紧开展了语言衰老现象研究。近十年来，相关研究成果日益丰富，方法上既有语言学范畴内部的描写与归纳，更多的是跨学科联手。相关研究成果可从三个方面概括：一是认知老化与语言理解研究，主要通过语言衰老现象考察其背后的认知老化过程，这是西方老年人语言衰老研究的起点；二是语言产出与社会交际研究，主要考察老年人在口语和书面语表达及社会语用交际中的特点；三是对特殊老年群体的语言研究，主要集中于患有老年痴呆症或帕金斯氏病等神经退行性疾病的老年人，分析其语言特征、神经功能退化对言语活动的影响等。这些研究表明：老年人语言衰老的根本原因在于认知老化、生理功能退化、神经退行性等疾病以及其它健康状况恶化。未来国内开展相关研究应当考虑培养与组建跨学科研究队伍、采用多模态语料库方法（包括构建历时语料库），以及加强以汉语为母语的特殊老年群体语言研究，从而形成语言衰老研究的中国特色，进一步加深对人类语言本质和相关脑机制的认识。

关键词: 语言发展, 认知变化, 衰老, 跨学科, 多模态