Abstract：For a long time gerontology has been preoccupied with such issues as pathology, epistemology, psychology, retirement of the aging population. The well-being of their linguistic life is generally overlooked, except that brain legions have resulted in language impairment and communication failure. This paper, based on a multimodal corpus of aging and language, introduces a four-category sampling scheme of the aging population: (1) superfit group, (2) successful aging group, (3) normal aging group and (4) abnormal aging group. Linguistically, the first two groups maintain their language competence and performance inherited from the middle adulthood; the normal aging group, the largest, however, undergoes a decline curve from the normal (including slips of the tongue), to attrition, to impairment. The abnormal aging, due to brain medical conditions, develops linguistic pathologies, AD patients being typical of the group. The surveyed literature pertinent to the topic includes cognitive neuroscience of aging, pathology of language, and neurobehavior of language and cognition. The central concern of gerontolinguistics, and its methodology are addressed and demonstrated from the corpus data.
