photo by: Nick Krug

Susan Kemper, a Roy A. Roberts distinguished professor of psychology, will be retiring at the end of the semester after 38 years at Kansas University. Kemper's area of specialty is gerontology and in her time she served as an early

Just as people do, Susan Kemper’s research focus has changed from children into elderly adults. Now, she’s passing it on to the next generation.

Kemper is retiring after 38 years at Kansas University. She is the Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor of psychology, and also a research scientist for KU’s Life Span Institute specializing in gerontology.

Kemper came to KU, straight out of graduate school, in 1978. She said her plan was to teach and do research on the psychology of language, with an emphasis on language development in children.

Specifically, she was looking at how children learn to use grammar when they tell stories.

Class discussions led Kemper and students to try the same experiment on older adults, starting with a student who interviewed grandparents in her neighborhood to see what kind of grammar constructions they used when telling stories. Although their stories were clear and engaging, analysis showed the older adults didn’t use the complex grammar constructions that children did.

“What happened to them? Where did they go?” Kemper said. “So I sort of changed gears from studying the kids to studying the older folks.”

That was around 1980, Kemper said. As her own research in the area progressed, so did researchers’ interest in gerontology because people were living longer and doing so with good health.

“People were sort of waking up to how interesting older adults were,” Kemper said.

Kemper was an “early pioneer” in the emerging field of cognitive aging, she said, and working to identify patterns seen in normal aging helped researchers then identify abnormal patterns.

It turns out it’s normal for older adults to lose their complex grammar as they age — “It’s last learned, first lost,” Kemper said — but that happening too soon or too rapidly can prove an early warning sign of conditions such as Alzheimer’s.

Kemper said she doesn’t plan to continue her research in retirement.

But she expects others in the field to continue moving it forward, and in more technologically advanced ways.

Groups are working on ways to automate recording and transcription and to use robots to monitor speech deficiencies, Kemper said. Another trend is embedding such technology in “smart homes” for older adults, where built-in sensors can pick up early warning signs of conditions through problems with speech, gait or other activities.

Perhaps most importantly, Kemper said she hopes her research leads to the development of behavioral and cognitive early interventions that could slow the onset of conditions.

“That’s where we need to go,” Kemper said. “We cannot wait for drug trials to come online … we need to be able to do something now.”

Kemper taught her last class at KU on Wednesday.

In another example of things coming full circle, it was language development — the first class she taught her first fall at KU.