Presentation
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How aging affects the neural basis of phonological neighborhood density and frequency
Poster C5 in Poster Session C, Wednesday, October 25, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Michele Diaz1, Abigail Cosgrove1, Haoyun Zhang2, Victoria Gertel1; 1Penn State University, 2University of Macao
Although many aspects of language remain stable with age, aging is associated with declines in language production. For example, compared to younger adults, older adults experience more tip-of-the-tongue states, show decreased speed and accuracy in naming objects, increased errors in spoken and written production, and more pauses and fillers in speech, all of which indicate age-related increases in retrieval difficulty. Although these behavioral effects are commonly observed, prior work from our lab suggests that the neural sensitivity to phonological features is stable across adulthood (Diaz et al., 2021). Prior work has demonstrated that words with small phonological neighborhoods and words that have a lower lexical frequency are produced more slowly by adults of all ages. Moreover, older adults may be particularly vulnerable to retrieval deficits with words that have particular characteristics such as sparse phonological neighborhoods or low lexical frequency (Gertel et al., 2020). But no studies have examined these lexical factors in combination, or with neuroimaging techniques (i.e., functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). In the present fMRI picture naming study, we investigated the influence of phonological neighborhood density (PND) and lexical frequency on the behavioral and neural bases of word retrieval across the lifespan (current N = 75, anticipated N = 90, ages 20-89). We will present behavioral and fMRI activation findings and discuss the implications these results have for cognitive and neural theories of aging.
Topic Areas: Language Production, Meaning: Lexical Semantics