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Article 1

Citation: Ryan, E. B., See, S. K., Meneer, W. B., & Trovato, D. (1992). Age-based perceptions of language performance among younger and older adults. Communication Research, 19(4), 423–443.

Abstract: The present study tested differences between younger and older adults in self-perceptions and social perceptions of language performance. Sixty younger adults (M = 26.4 years) and 60 older adults (M = 72.9 years) completed the Language in Adulthood Questionnaire for themselves and then in terms of typical adults aged either 25 years or 75 years. As predicted, the younger respondents reported fewer problems with receptive and expressive aspects of conversational language performance than did their older counterparts. In terms of social perceptions, the two respondent groups expected individuals aged 25 to experience fewer problems with receptive and expressive language than individuals aged 75, except for two specially selected items for which the ratings predictably favored those aged 75 (i.e., telling enjoyable stories, sincere when talking). To provide perspective for these youth-oriented findings in the language domain, perceptions of conversational differences between adults of 25 and 75 were seen by both respondent groups to be less than age differences in memory and hearing. The study was designed and interpreted within a framework of multiple influences of language performance in later life that emphasizes cognitive, situational, and social psychological determinants.

Article 2

Citation: Rosati, M. (2003, July 1). The making and representing of society: Religion, the sacred and solidarity among strangers in a Durkheimian perspective. Journal of Classical Sociology, 3(2), 173–196.

Abstract: In this paper, different interpretations of the sociological concept of the sacred are analyzed and put in relation with the idea of solidarity. In the first section, a particular understanding of the Durkheimian conception of the sacred is shown to express both the sociological and the philosophical meaning of the idea of normativity. In the second part, Habermas's thought on religion is analyzed and shown to develop in four stages. Here the point is that one can understand the emancipatory profile of modernity—which Habermas analyzed in terms of communicative reason—as the core of a collective representation that, once idealized, can be understood as a secular form of the sacred. Finally, a third section is dedicated to a self-reflective defence of the nexus between solidarity and the sacred, a self-reflective defence that implies a criticism of the trivial secularized self-understanding of modernity.