Lexical diversity in younger and older adults

One language processing domain that is particularly affected by language processing is lexical retrieval – in other words, access to words in the mental lexicon. According to the inhibition deficit hypothesis (Burke, 1997), age-related changes in lexical retrieval may be due to age-related decrease in inhibitory function. Possibly, older adults have greater difficulty inhibiting the lexical activation of irrelevant items and thus activating target items.

We are testing this hypothesis with a sentence completion paradigm: participants have to complete 120 Russian sentences with one appropriate word. The sentences vary in the predictability of this final word: some sentences are completely predictable, whereas others can be completed in numerous possible ways. We hypothesize that (1) older adults should have an increased negative effect of low predictability, because they have greater difficulty inhibiting competing lexical items, and (2) also due to decrease in inhibitory function, the older group should provide less diverse sentence completion because they should have greater difficulty inhibiting the most salient lexical activations. By today, we have collected the data of 100 younger and 100 older adults and the analysis will be completed soon.

An additional output of this study will be a normative Russian-language database of sentence completion that can be used to select stimuli for any future psycho- and neurolinguistics research. Upon project completion, the database will be freely available online.

Presentations

Malyutina S., Lapin Y., Myslina (Terekhina) M. Predictability effects in sentence completion in younger and older adults. Poster presented at the Aging & Cognition conference, Zurich, Switzerland, 20-22 April 2017.

Malyutina S., Lapin Y., Myslina (Terekhina) M. Predictability effects and lexical diversity in sentence completion in younger and older adults. Poster presented at the International Workshop on Language Production», Nijmegen, Netherlands, 2-4 July 2018.


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