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Middle-aged and elderly healthy subjects were interviewed informally, and their discourse productions were analyzed to test for age-related changes in language-specific, microlinguistic, and in higher order organizational, macrolinguistic abilities. No significant age differences were found on microlinguistic measures, including syntactic complexity and syntactic and lexical production errors, and there were also no age differences in the use of lexical cohesive ties, such as anaphora. Older subjects, however, obtained significantly lower ratings on a macrolinguistic measure of global thematic coherence. Elderly subjects failed to maintain coherent reference to the general topic of discourse, although they preserved coherent meaning relationships between contiguous utterances. These results are most compatible with the view that age-related performance declines on language tasks primarily reflect changes in macrolinguistic abilities that require integration of linguistic and nonlinguistic cognitive processes, rather than changes in language-specific cognitive processes.

The same acquired disorder of spelling may be due to deficits affecting lexical representations of word spelling or deficits affecting the mechanisms that process those representations. This study sought to distinguish these possibilities in a dysgraphic patient. The integrity of the patient's lexical orthographic representations was assessed by having him decide whether or not pairs of words presented auditorily rhymed. Although the patient was impaired on a variety of spelling tasks and with all types of stimulus material, he showed a normal effect of spelling on the rhyme task. Like normal subjects, he was faster at deciding that words rhymed when they were spelled similarly (e.g. tool-cool) than when they were spelled dissimilarly (e.g. rule-cool) and slower at deciding that words did not rhyme when they were spelled similarly (e.g. toad-broad) than when they were spelled dissimilarly (e.g. code-broad). Therefore, as the patient's lexical representations of word spelling seemed to be generally intact, his spelling problems were probably due to difficulty in processing those representations.

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