PROCESSING OF THE WRITTEN WORD IN NORMAL AGING

This research analyzes the handwriting of isolated words in twenty elderly (between seventy and eighty years of age) to determine whether the syllabic effects, found in previous studies on the handwriting of young people, are maintained or deteriorate with age. Two experiments were designed, and each one assessed a different syllabic effect: syllable frequency, and syllable boundaries of words, respectively. The stimuli of the two experiments were presented auditory to the participants, who were to write each word they heard on a graphics tablet. The results (which were compared with data collected from previous investigations that have evaluated the same effects on young people) indicate that the effects related to the syllable frequency and syllable boundaries of words are preserved with age, although older adults systematically reported a larger time execution of the written task than the young.