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Assessing Concreteness Rating Data in Older Adults
Poster C59 in Poster Session C, Friday, October 7, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm EDT, Millennium Hall
Jacquelyn Stochel1, Chaleece Sandberg1; 1Penn State University
Concreteness is a psycholinguistic measure which captures how easily a word evokes the senses. Words may either be concrete (e.g., ROSE) or abstract (e.g., LOVE), and the concreteness effect is the observation that concrete words are processed more easily than abstract words. Paivio (1971) developed a concreteness rating scale to measure this property of words, which has since been applied to large-scale survey research. Brysbaert et al. (2013) used this scale to develop a database of concreteness ratings for nearly 40,000 words. This work has been an important resource for researchers examining the concreteness effect; however, closer review of this work reveals that a large percentage of raters were younger adults and only one percent of raters were over the age of 65. This raises questions about the possibility of overlooking older adult perceptions of concreteness. In response, the present study was developed to examine judgments of word concreteness in older adults, operationalized using the Brysbaert et al. (2013) procedures. Word ratings were obtained through online surveys, which contained a subset of the items sampled by Brysbaert et al. (2013). Some control measures for stimuli were the exclusion of proper nouns, pronouns, and items of extreme word lengths, and a limitation for using only one word containing a given root (e.g., ENJOY or ENJOYING, but not both). A total of ten surveys were created in Qualtrics, and each survey was distributed to 25 respondents aged 50 years or older via Prolific. At the beginning of each survey, each participant was introduced to the concreteness rating scale and then proceeded to rate 300 words—10 initial practice words, 284 words for sampling, and 6 control words to screen for instruction compliance. All individual ratings for words were averaged together to create a database of concreteness ratings for this older adult sample. The average ratings from the current sample could then be compared to the ratings obtained in the Brysbaert et al. (2013) study. An analysis of the 2840 rated words revealed a significant difference in concreteness ratings across the two subject pools, where the older adult raters in the present study provided lower average concreteness ratings than the generally younger respondents sampled by Brysbaert et al. (2013). This evidence suggests that older adults judge words as being more abstract than younger adults. This insight can inform the way concreteness effects are studied in older adult populations, which can help improve semantic theories and theories of aging. This insight can also inform the way word retrieval therapies for persons with aphasia (PWA) are developed. Common etiologies of aphasia (e.g., stroke) are most prevalent in older adults. Therefore, the existence of older adult concreteness rating data can afford speech therapists a resource to design more age-appropriate activities which prompt abstract and concrete word retrieval in PWA. Brysbaert, M., Warriner, A. B., & Kuperman, V. (2014). [Citations: Concreteness ratings for 40 thousand generally known English word lemmas. Behavior research methods, 46(3), 904-911. Paivio, A. (1971). Imagery and language. In Imagery (pp. 7-32). Academic Press.]
Topic Areas: Meaning: Lexical Semantics, Disorders: Acquired