Effects of age and education on the lexico-semantic content of connected speech in adults, 1998 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Effects of age and education on the lexico-semantic content of connected speech in adults
Journal of Communication Disorders, 1998
One hundred and thirty-three subjects who considered themselves to be in good health described the bank robbery picture from an aphasia battery for French-speaking subjects. The subjects' connected speech was analyzed and various lexico-semantic measures were obtained. For the purposes of analysis, the subjects were grouped according to age and education level. Results demonstrated that subjects with fewer years of education produced less content than subjects with higher levels of education. Age also affected subjects' performance but only when considering efficiency, the number of content units as a function of time, and the number of different open-class words as a function of time. Older subjects tended to repeat the same content units (using mostly the same words) and comment on some word-finding difficulties they experienced. These behaviors may explain why older subjects were less efficient in the transmission of lexico-semantic information. The results emphasize how age can affect lexico-semantic performance, and add new data about the effects of education, which should be taken into consideration when assessing persons who may show signs of a language disorder.
Language in normal aging: Linguistic and neuropsychological factors
Journal of Neurolinguistics, 1989
We have hypothesized that non-linguistic cognitive factors (memory, attention, etc.) contribute to the language changes of normal aging. In this paper, after reviewing the changing patterns of language use associated with normal aging, we address the question of whether and how non-lin~istic factors contribute to these patterns. We focus on the processes of naming. One hundred and fifty-two men and women, ages 30-79, were administe~d three naming tests: the Boston Naming Test, the Action Naming Test, and the Category Naming Test. In addition, each subject was tested on several neuropsychoiogical tests that provided measures of short and long-term memory, attention, visual-perceptual processes, metaiinguistic skills, perseveration, and semantic memory. On the basis of performance on the neuropsychologicai tests, we developed a model of neuropsychoiogicai measures that may influence naming performance. Multiple regression analyses revealed that although our measures did contribute significantly to naming performance across age groups, a different pattern emerged within each age group, Our results indicate that involvement of non-linguistic cognitive processes innaming may actually decrease with age. These findings suggest that the mild anomia of normal aging is primarily linguistic. and is not significantfy influenced by memory, attentional, perceptual, or metalinguistic factors.
Spontaneous language production and aging: sex and educational effects
1996
Sex and educational level effects on spontaneous language production at different ages were analyzed in a 180normal subject sample taken from the general population. Subjects were divided into groups according to three variables: (1) age (16-30,31-50, and 51-65 years), (2) educational level (3-7,8-12 and more than 12 years of formal educational), and (3) sex (males and females) with 10 subjects in each cell. The oral description of the Plate #I ("The Cookie "heft") from the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination was selected. Number of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and grammatical connectors were scored for each subject's picture description. It was concluded that: (1) the ratio among different phrase elements was very uniform across age, educational level and sex groups; (2) the total number of words used to describe the "The Cookie Theft" picture significantly increased with the subject's educational level; (3) the amount of spontaneous language in general decreased with age; however, a significant interaction-effect between age and sex was observed. A steady and pronounced spontaneous language decrease across age-groups was observed in males. However, only mild differences across age-groups were observed in female subjects. It was hypothetized that language changes during aging are strongly sex-dependent: while in men spontaneous language rapidly decreases with aging, in women spontaneous language production remains quite well-preserved.
Marklund Sikstrom Baath Nilsson 2009 Age effects on semantic coherence semapro 2009
We investigated age-related changes in the semantic distance between successively generated words in two letter fluency tasks differing with respect to demands placed on executive control. The semantic distance was measured by Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). The results show that older people have a larger semantic distance between successively generated items than young people, and that this effect is particularly pronounced in the more demanding fluency task. Taken together, our findings support the idea that elderly have a less distinct semantic network compared to young people while also demonstrating the feasibility of LSA as a powerful tool for delineating multifaceted aspects of semantic organization inherent in behavioural data from language production tasks.
Journal of Adult Development, 2011
The aim of this study was to determine whether verbal knowledge can compensate for the age-related decline in word production during a fluency test. We assessed the performance of 20 young and 20 old subjects in standard letter and semantic fluency tasks over time (T1: 0-30 s vs. T2: 31-60 s). The number of words produced, switching, and clustering components (Troyer et al. Neuropsychology, 11(1): 138-146, 1997) were investigated. Correlations between age and cognitive factors (processing speed, executive functions, and vocabulary level) were analyzed. The results revealed a knowledge compensation mechanism in elderly subjects, but only in letter fluency productions. It only occurred during the second period and was related to an increase in the clustering component and a positive correlation between age and vocabulary level. The differences between letter and semantic fluency performances are discussed in terms of the nature of the nonsemantic and semantic components involved in these tasks.
Lexicosemantic processing in normal and pathological aging /
Thèse presentée i la Faculté des études supérieures en vue de l'obtention de grade de Ph.D. en sciences biomédicales option neuropsychologie Novembre, 2004 © Vanessa Taler, 2004 ø.a 0ê4D %IPersi Université de Montréal Faculté des études supérieures Cette thèse intitulée Lexicosemantic processing in normal and pathological aging presentée par V-tnessi Taler a été évaluée par un jury composé des personnes suivantes:
Connected Language in Late Middle-Aged Adults at Risk for Alzheimer’s Disease
Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, 2016
Connected language is often impaired among people with Alzheimer's Disease (AD), yet little is known about when language difficulties first emerge on the path to a clinical diagnosis. The objective of this study was to determine whether individuals with psychometric (preclinical) evidence of amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) (pMCI) showed deficits in connected language measures. Participants were 39 pMCI and 39 cognitively healthy (CH) adults drawn from the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer's Prevention, who were matched for age, literacy, and sex. Participants completed a connected language task in which they described the Cookie Theft picture from the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination. Language samples were analyzed across 3 language domains: content, syntactic complexity, and speech fluency. Paired t-tests were used to compare CH and pMCI groups on all variables, and Cohen's d effect sizes were calculated for each comparison. The CH and pMCI groups differed significantly on measures of content (e.g., CH group produced more semantic units, more unique words and had larger idea density, on average, than the pMCI group). The picture description findings are consistent with previous retrospective studies showing semantic language differences in adults with autopsy-confirmed AD. Given that these comparisons are between cognitively healthy and pMCI individuals (before a clinical MCI diagnosis), these findings may represent subtle language difficulty in spontaneous speech, and may be predictive of larger language changes over time.
2021
One of the notable language difficulties experienced by healthy older adults is word retrieval failure, specifically the tip-of-the-tongue state (TOT). A TOT occurs when one has a strong sense of knowing the word, such that the semantic content is accessed, but the entirety of the word's phonology is temporarily inaccessible. Such retrieval difficulty is attributable, at least in part, to characteristics of the target word. Psycholinguistic features may uniquely influence the semantic and/or phonological stages of word production. An additional factor known to influence TOT-likelihood is noun type: proper nouns elicit TOTs more often than do common nouns. The discrepancy between the likelihood of a TOT for the two noun types is hypothesized to be due to their differential representation in the mental lexicon. The difference hinges on the connection architecture at the semantic level (between semantic nodes and the lemma node) for common and proper nouns-the former characterized by convergent, many-to-one connections and the latter by one-to-one connections. The extent to which the representation of common and proper nouns accounts for retrieval difficulties as a consequence of psycholinguistic factors known to interact with the semantic level and phonological levels is poorly understood. Therefore, this dissertation examined the contribution of several psycholinguistic features to the likelihood of successful retrieval at the semantic and phonological stages in a set of common and proper nouns.