The multimodal CorpAGEst corpus: Keeping an eye on pragmatic competence in later life

The CorpAGEst project aims to establish the verbal and gestural profile of very old people, looking at their pragmatic competence in real-world settings. To reach this goal, a multimodal corpus was created to carry out corpus-based analyses with the aim of testing several hypotheses: (i) (inter)subjective discourse markers (e.g., tu sais/vous savez ‘you know’) and pragmatic gestures (e.g., an exaggerated opening of the eyes) are relevant indicators of the overall pragmatic competence of the aging subject [transversal approach] ; (ii) a change in the concurrent use of these (non)verbal pragmatic cues (incl. speech, facial expression, eye gaze, hand gesture, and body gesture) could be an indicator of an adaptive strategy used, with advancing age, to reduce the cost of language production during interaction [longitudinal approach]. In response to European socio-economic concerns about the aging population, the project’s contribution is multiple: (i) enrichment of the discussion of the concrete strategies to be implemented to promote ‘aging well’ in later life (e.g., by improving care of older people); (ii) provision of a multimodal corpus and annotation interaction system that may serve as a basis for further studies on language competence in later life (e.g., as an aid to early detection of dementia)