Adult Age Differences in the Use of Conceptual Combination as an Associative Encoding Strategy

Abstract

It is well-established that aging impairs memory for associations more than it does memory for single items. Aging also impacts processes involved in online language comprehension, including the ability to form integrated, message-level representations. These changes in comprehension processes could impact older adults’ associative memory performance, perhaps by reducing or altering the effectiveness of encoding strategies that encourage semantic integration. The present study examined age differences in the use of a strategy termed conceptual combination, which involves integrating two words (e.g., “winter” and “salad”) into a single concept (“a salad for winter”). We recorded ERPs while participants studied unrelated noun pairs using a strategy that either did or did not encourage conceptual combination. We also varied the concreteness of the first noun in each pair in order to measure compositional concreteness effects, or ERP differences at the second noun due to the concreteness of the first noun. At the first nouns, older adults showed word-level concreteness effects that were similar to those of younger adults. However, compositional concreteness effects were diminished in older adults, consistent with reduced semantic integration. Older adults’ associative memory performance was better for word pairs studied during the conceptual combination task versus the non-combinatory encoding task; however, the magnitude of the age-related associative memory deficit did not differ between tasks. Finally, analyses of both memory accuracy and trial-by-trial ratings of perceived combination success suggested that older adults had disproportionate difficulty applying the conceptual combination strategy to word pairs that began with abstract nouns. Overall, these results indicate that changes to integrative language processing that occur with age are not independent of – and may sometimes exacerbate – age-related memory decline.

Connecting and considering: Electrophysiology provides insights into comprehension

“…Visual half‐field studies have revealed that this effect is linked to right hemisphere‐biased processing (Huang et al., 2010). Like other forms of active comprehension, the concreteness effect is non‐obligatory, varying with stimulus type (Lee & Federmeier, 2008) and task demands related to imagery (Gullick et al., 2013), and, again, is reduced with normal aging (Huang et al., 2012; Lucas et al., 2017, 2019). Thus, both hemispheres augment basic comprehension with more active processes that, on the one hand (hemisphere!…”

How the healthy ageing brain supports semantic binding during language comprehension

“…Moreover, effects of message‐level congruity on the N400 are delayed by over 200 ms in older adults (Federmeier et al, 2003). Ageing furthermore affects processing of compositional concreteness, that is, processing of the second noun in a noun–noun pair, in function of whether the first was concrete versus abstract (e.g., alias‐battle vs. skate‐battle) (Lucas et al, 2019), further suggesting that there are age‐related changes in compositional semantics in healthy older (compared with young) adults.…”

Differentiation of the Contribution of Familiarity and Recollection to the Old/New Effects in Associative Recognition: Insight from Semantic Relation

“…All were native Chinese speakers and had normal or corrected-to-normal visual acuity. They all were right-handed as measured via the Edinburgh Handedness Questionnaire and had a reliability of 0.87 in Chinese participants [ 59 ], which followed previous memory investigations [ 9 , 11 , 26 ]. None of them reported any history of neurological or psychiatric disorders and/or colour blindness.…”

“…In daily life, one may undergo numerous events, and some of them are bound together. Research on the memory of the combination of distinct events causes great attention, and such capability to remember events experienced together is referred to as associative memory [ 6 , 7 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 ]. In a typical associative recognition paradigm, several strings of pairs (e.g., A-B, C-D, and E-F) are studied, and in the following test, participants are instructed to determine whether a pair is intact (the same as the one in the preceding study phase, e.g., A-B), rearranged (both items in the pair are studied but are recombined, e.g., C-F), or new (both items are novel, e.g., G-H) [ 7 , 8 , 25 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 ].…”