Aging and word finding: Reverse vocabulary and Cloze tests

Abstract

Two tasks were used to evaluate age differences in "word-finding difficulty,"-lexical access and retrieval-for 31 young adults (college students) and 24 healthy, community-dwelling older adults (aged 58 to 86). Comparison of performances on a traditional (forward) and a reverse vocabulary test for the same set of 43 nouns indicated that the aged could define the words as well as or better than the young, but that they had greater difficulty thinking of the word when given the definition. A Cloze task, in which 32 nouns had been deleted from each of four prose passages, required that participants try to guess the deleted words. On this task, the performances of young and old adults were very similar. The only suggestion of greater word-finding difficulty for the aged was that they more often failed to provide any response, although in absolute terms these omission errors were quite rare for both age groups.A common observation of the aged regarding subjective changes in memory function is that they have trouble bringing some things they know to mind when they want to-most notably, people's names and words they wish to use in conversation (Cohen & Faulkner, 1986; Maylor, in press;Sunderland, Watts, Baddeley, & Harris, 1986). This is true even in "advantaged" samples (e.g., those in Hellebrandt, 1980;Lovelace & Twohig, 1990). This problem with semantic memory seems at odds with the common empirical finding that vocabulary remains very much intact for healthy older adults (Botwinick, 1984). However, the usual vocabulary test is a test of the ability to get from words to their meanings (speech comprehension), whereas the complaint is made with regard to a difficulty in moving from meanings to specific words (speech production).We hypothesized that everyone experiences some asymmetry with respect to the relative difficulty of moving from meanings to words and words to meanings. We rarely hear someone use a word that we know without being able to think of its meaning, yet most of us will occasionally want to use a word to convey a particular meaning and find ourselves unable to think of the word. Given the perception of many aged that this word-finding difficulty increases in frequency as they grow older (Lovelace & Twohig, 1990), we hypothesized that this asymmetry would be greater for old than for young adults.Papers based on these data were presented by the first author at the Third Cognitive Aging Conference, Atlanta, GA, March, 1990 33Previous work of Bowles and Poon (1985) and Burke, Worthley, and Martin (1988) provided some support for these hypotheses. Burke et al. had young and old adults keep diaries to record occurrences of tip-of-the-tongue states, clear cases of word-finding difficulty. Older participants recorded significantly more of these events. Bowles and Poon found that the elderly were significantly less likely than young adults to be able to recall the correct word when read the word's definition. They took this to "reflect a specifically directional breakdown in the connection from the semantic ...

The impact of semantic memory organization and sentence context information on spoken language processing by younger and older adults: An ERP study

“…As in previous studies comparing cloze probability judgments from younger and older adults~which have all reported no age-related changes; e.g., Hamberger, Friedman, & Rosen, 1996;Lovelace & Coon, 1991!, we found that older and younger adults gave qualitatively and quantitatively similar patterns of responses to our materials. Older adults gave the same dominant response as the young on all but six of the items~and these differences were lexical rather than semantic in nature-e.g., a sentence that could be completed with either "rats" or "mice," with the younger adults tending to use "rats" and the older adults "mice"!.…”

Working Memory Affects Older Adults’ Use of Context in Spoken-Word Recognition

“…Twenty-three students of the Radboud University Nijmegen were paid for their participation in this self-paced web experiment. We only collected cloze probability ratings from younger adults, as past research has shown no age differences in cloze probability ratings (Federmeier, McLennan, De Ochoa, & Kutas, 2002;Lahar, Tun, & Wingfield, 2004;Lovelace & Coon, 1991). Participants first read the target sentences up to the target word and were asked to continue the sentence fragment with one word.…”

Language attrition and theories of forgetting: A cross-disciplinary review

“…A major source of evidence for such a view comes from studies of language forgetting in monolingual speakers who are not situated in a language contact environment. Older adults experience word finding problems, such as tip-of-the-tongue states, more frequently than younger adults (e.g., Brown & Nix, 1996;Burke, 1999;Gollan & Silverberg, 2001;Lovelace, 1991;Maylor, 1990). Older adults also produce more spelling errors than young adults (MacKay & Abrams, 1998), that is, they frequently experience problems retrieving orthographic knowledge.…”