New Perspectives on the Aging Lexicon

Abstract

The field of cognitive aging has seen considerable advances in describing the linguistic and semantic changes that happen during the adult life span to uncover the structure of the mental lexicon (i.e., the mental repository of lexical and conceptual representations). Nevertheless, there is still debate concerning the sources of these changes, including the role of environmental exposure and several cognitive mechanisms associated with learning, representation, and retrieval of information. We review the current status of research in this field and outline a framework that promises to assess the contribution of both ecological and psychological aspects to the aging lexicon. Cognitive Aging and the Mental LexiconThere is consensus in the cognitive sciences that human development extends well beyond childhood and adolescence, and there has been remarkable empirical progress in the field of cognitive aging in past decades [1]. Nevertheless, the role of environmental and cognitive factors in age-related changes in the structure and processing of lexical and semantic representations (see Glossary) is still under debate. For example, age-related memory decline is commonly attributed to a decline in cognitive abilities [2,3], yet some researchers have proposed that massive exposure to language over the course of one's life leads to knowledge gains that may contribute to, if not fully account for, age-related memory deficits [4][5][6]. We argue that to resolve such debates we require an interdisciplinary approach that captures how information exposure across adulthood may change the way that we acquire, represent, and recall information. We summarize recent developments in the field (Figure 1, Table 1) and propose a conceptual framework (Figure 2, Key Figure) and associated research agenda that argues for combining ecological analyses, formal modeling, and large-scale empirical studies to shed light on the contents, structure, and neural basis of the aging mental lexicon in both health and disease. Mental Lexicon: Aging and Cognitive PerformanceThe mental lexicon can be thought of as a repository of lexical and conceptual representations, composed of organized networks of semantic, phonological, orthographic, morphological, and other types of information [7]. The cognitive sciences have provided considerable knowledge about the computational (Box 1; [8][9][10][11]) and neural basis (Box 2; [12,13]) of lexical and semantic cognition, and there has been considerable interest in how such aspects of cognition change across adulthood and aging [14,15].Past work on the aging lexicon emphasized the amount of information acquired across the life span (e.g., vocabulary gains across adulthood; [15]); however, new evaluations using graphbased approaches suggest that both quantity and structural aspects of representations differ between individuals [16] and change across the life span [17][18][19]. Such insights were gathered, for example, from a large-scale analysis of free association data from thousands of individuals [17], rangi...

Multiplex networks quantify robustness of the mental lexicon to catastrophic concept failures, aphasic degradation and ageing

“…Interestingly, the above patterns are preserved even through ageing, when the multiplex structure is changed in order to account for alterations 57,58 in semantic memory patterns (i.e. free associations) provided by young adults, adults and older adults.…”

“…Notice also that the current analysis is limited to investigating only structural changes, and not functional nor dynamical ones, in the mental lexicon. This approximation does not keep into account cognitive search strategies 3,52 over such structure, that might also degrade along with cognitive impairments 7,8,51 or ageing 58 . The debate between structure and dynamics represents a relatively open field of investigation in psycholinguistics, where the most commonly accepted hypothesis is that search strategies and mental lexicon structure are strongly inter-dependent 3 .…”

“…The resulting age groups considered weaker free associations, produced by at least 3 individuals of the following ages: (i) younger than 22 years old, (ii) between 22 and 28 years old, (iii) between 28 and 36 years old, (iv) between 36 and 50 years old and (v) older than 53 years old. Free associations map patterns of memory recall 10,35 , which is supposed to change with ageing 57,58 . In this way, considering more fine-grained layers of semantic associations filtered by age can provide temporal snapshots about how the robustness of the mental lexicon evolves with ageing.…”

Beyond Preferences: Self-Concept Clarity and Social Decision Making

“…Deyne, Navarro, & Storms, 2013; see Wulff et al, 2019, for a review) and in preferential judgment and decision making tasks (see Bathia, 2017, for an overview; see also Stolier, Hehman, & Freeman, 2018). As making decisions about oneself and others requires accessing the underlying memory representation of oneself and others, we suspect that the differences in the organization of individuals' self-concept may via similar pathways affect individual's ability to make fast and accurate decisions.…”