Language Development: The lifespan perspective generates insights into the central issues of age-dependent language change, focusing especially on the middle and later stages of life. The contributors exploit contemporary and historical longitudinal data, adopting psycholinguistic, corpus linguistic and sociolinguistic approaches. Linguistic changes are discussed against the background of cognitive, somatic and social factors. Bringing the resulting contributions together, the volume aims to resume the discussion of contradictions between the models of change and constancy over an individual's lifespan that have not been sufficiently resolved to date. The volume is intended to serve as an interdisciplinary reference resource for those conducting research on language development and the aging process and as a supplementary course book on language variability and change.