Major Life Events Impact the Way People Speak

Key points

Age has often been found to be a big factor driving linguistic differences

The impact of major life changes, and not just chronological age, has not been well-explored

New research identifies which life events trigger changes and the type of influence they have

No one expects a teenager and a senior citizen to sound the same, but the question of exactly how age influences our language use is more complex than it might at first seem. A fascinating new study probes how specific life events and experiences might have more of an impact on your linguistic choices than your chronological age per se.

The influence of life experience

While age is often included in many studies of contemporary language change, the reasons that aging affects language are often left underexplored.