Grandpa, tell me a story! Narrative ability in healthy aging and its relationship with cognitive functions and Theory of Mind

Healthy aging affects the linguistic and cognitive abilities involved in narrative production. However, few studies provided a comprehensive assessment of narrative skills in aging and their association with cognitive and Theory of Mind (ToM) functions. We explored how aging influences narrative skills, at both micro- (i.e. lexical and grammatical) and macrolinguistic (i.e. pragmatic and discourse) levels. Sixty healthy adults divided into three age-groups (20-40, 65-75, 76-86 years old) were administered tasks assessing narrative production skills, executive functions (EFs), and ToM. A network approach was used to explore how micro- and macrolinguistic skills were associated to different cognitive and ToM functions. The analyses revealed age-related effects on various aspects of language production, including phonology, semantic retrieval, sentence complexity, coherence, cohesion, and lexical informativeness. Moreover, a significant relationship was found between linguistic measures, ToM skills and cognitive functions such as working and long-term memory and inhibition.