Story-type effects on the assessment of discourse production in healthy aging

This study investigates the effect of different types of stimuli on narrative discourse production in healthy aging. 162 adults, aged 20–89 years, produced narratives prompted by two single images (“Picnic” and “Cookie Theft”) and three vignettes (“Nest”, “Quarrel”, and “Flowerpot”). The study addressed three key questions: (1) how aging impacts discourse production, (2) differences in narratives elicited using single versus sequential images, and (3) task-specific effects on linguistic performance. The results showed that aging affects narrative quality more than length. Older adults in their late 70s and 80s produced fewer grammatically complete sentences, more coherence errors, and less informative narratives, particularly with single-image tasks requiring higher cognitive inference. Sequential images elicited longer narratives with fewer local coherence errors, highlighting their scaffolding benefits. The “Cookie Theft” picture elicited more semantic and local coherence errors in older adults, highlighting its potential clinical utility for detecting subtle linguistic difficulties. Overall, task design significantly influenced narrative outcomes, with sequential images supporting coherence and elaboration, while single images challenged inference and lexical retrieval. The clinical implications of these findings are discussed.