Presentation

Abigail Cosgrove¹, Michele Diaz¹; ¹The Pennsylvania State University

Healthy aging is associated with declines across a variety of cognitive domains, including memory, processing speed, executive functioning, and language production ability (Burke & Shafto, 2004, 2008; Salthouse, 2010). Life experiences and conceptual knowledge, however, tend to increase with age (Park et al., 2002). While some researchers claim that age-enriched semantic information leads to greater interference, other research shows that vocabulary measures are positively associated with increased naming and verbal fluency production, suggesting that vocabulary knowledge supports production (Kavé _& Halamish, 2015; Shafto et al., 2017). Regardless of the effect that this extra information has on aging, individuals continuously acquire and retain new words, concepts, and ideas that need representation in the semantic system. Computationally modeled networks allow us to analyze the interactions between a large sample of semantic information (Siew et al., 2019). These semantic networks have been utilized across various research areas – creativity, language acquisition, aphasia patients, and healthy aging. Previous work focused on semantic networks and aging have found that with increased age, semantic memory becomes less efficient, less organized, and sparsely connected (Cosgrove et al., 2021; Dubossarsky et al., 2017; Wulff et al., 2018, 2019). While these early studies contributed seminal knowledge about the effect of age on semantic network structure, they focused on group-level differences and only considered a limited sample of words. It still remains unclear if language production abilities are influenced by differences in individual network properties, local structural characteristics, or linguistic features of the word (i.e., concreteness). These questions remain especially pertinent for aging populations where differences in environment, life experiences, and cognitive abilities are more variable across the cohort (Wulff et al., 2019). This proposed project will provide evidence regarding the extent to which the organization of an individual’s ample semantic system influences their language communication abilities. In addition, no studies have yet compared the structural property differences between abstract and concrete concepts in semantic memory and how this relates to the efficient processing of information through the network (Kenett et al., 2021). However, both abstract and concrete concepts make up one’s mental lexicon and therefore contribute to the semantic network. Moreover, studying differences between abstract and concrete words remain critical to examine the effects of context on network organization (Crutch et al., 2009). For example, abstract words generally require more effortful retrieval from semantic memory, yet older adults have been shown to have a heavier reliance on semantic knowledge and context when completing semantic selection tasks (Hoffman, 2018). Therefore, we might expect that abstract words are not as well connected in semantic memory, making them less resistant to age-related decline. Finding evidence of this relationship between abstract and concrete words in semantic memory could shed new light on the successful processing and retrieval for a broader set of words in the aging lexicon.

Topic Areas: Meaning: Combinatorial Semantics, Language Production