Aspects of written language production over adult life

Self-descriptions written by adults were analyzed to explore the effects of age, gender, vocabulary, nonverbal intelligence, and educational-occupational status on lexical aspects of language and grammatical complexity. Multivariate analyses indicated that, after controlling for other background variables, age had a significant effect on vocabulary diversity, sentence complexity, subordinating conjunctions, and possibly sentence length. Four variables--word output, word length, long words, and readability--were affected mainly by vocabulary and educational-occupational status. An unexpected and small but significant gender difference in the readability of the descriptions was observed across all age groups.