2025-06-20
6 分钟Today I'm going to talk about language learning and aging.
How often have you had the sensation that you're looking for a word or a name and you can't quite remember it but you feel you should be able to remember that it's on the tip of your tongue but you can't quite retrieve it?
It's happening to me more and more or so it seems.
So I did a bit of research on the internet and apparently this tip of the tongue phenomenon is associated with aging.
It's something that occurs throughout our lives
as we get older but it's particularly noticeable with people who are more advanced in age,
such as me, for example.
And I have noticed it with names and with words.
It seems that I almost have the word, but I can't find it.
It turns out that as we get older, we are not as good at retrieving information from scratch,
so to speak, from memory, recalling it, but we rely more and more on recognition.
So given a choice between A and B, is it John or Bob?
Is it Mary or Sally?
We can identify it as John or Mary.
And this then...
relates to greater ease of comprehension or passive vocabulary or reading or understanding what we hear where the need to recall something
while not non-existent there are more clues in that context in the comprehension activity than when we're all of a sudden looking for something for which we don't have as many clues so that is natural and according to the information and i'll leave some links here it's not associated with alzheimer's which is kind of good to know so
as i feel myself increasingly you know having difficulty retrieving things uh it's perfectly normal but it's not associated with alzheimer's but it is an example of how our brains evolve and We have to deal,
live with where we are in the sort of spectrum.
And it's kind of interesting because it relates to this whole issue of age and language learning.