Ageing And Language

Question 1

How did Rabaglia & Salthouse (2011) look at spoken language comprehension?

Answer 1

858 ppts between 18-90 years old
Cookie theft task or admire task measuring lexical sophistication & diversity, & grammatical complexity
Word usage increases with age (increased lower frequency words), grammatical complexity decreases

Question 2

How did Verhaegen & Poncelet (2012) measure accuracy & speed of language?

Answer 2

Picture naming task - older took longer & less accurate

Question 3

What are tip-of-the-tongue effects & how did Heine et al (1999) investigate it?

Answer 3

Older have greater effects
3 age categories (18-24, 60-74, 80-92)
Experimentally induced tip of tongues (provide word for definition)
Naturally occurring tips of tongues (keep diary)
Number increased with age

Question 4

How does language comprehension increase with age & how does Sommers (1996) investigate it?

Answer 4

Correctly understanding speech becomes harder with age
Sommers found difficulties with identification in louder environments
Hard vs easy words - correct identification lower for older

Question 5

How did Dubno et al (1984) look at language comprehension?

Answer 5

Compared under 44 to over 65 with understanding with background talking speech to babble ratio needed to be larger for older

Question 6

How does reading speed change with age and what are studies that looked at this?

Answer 6

Slows with age
Zhang et al (2022) - meta analysis of eye movements during reading - younger = faster
Lott et al (2001) - mean reading speed declines with age, proportion of slower readers increases

Question 7

What did Rayner et al (2006) find about eye movements during reading?

Answer 7

Young vs old using word frequency manipulation & word predictability manipulation
Older = slower, more fixations, more regressions, moved eyes further forward in text & more likely to skip words
Generally older had higher frequency effects than younger

Question 8

What did Zhang et al (2022) find when looking at eye movements during reading?

Answer 8

Meta analysis of older vs younger
Consistent pattern of age difference in alphabetic languages
Older show larger word frequency effects in some measures, limited evidence for word predictability

Question 9

What did Rayner et al (2006) find when looking at risky reading strategy?

Answer 9

Maintaining reading speeds leads to older adults guessing words
Produce longer forward saccades & more skips
Also more regressions

Question 10

How did Zhang et al (2022) measure cross linguistic differences in reading?

Answer 10

Compared alphabetic & Chinese
Older Chinese showed greater slow down
Unlike older alphabetic, older Chinese made shorter progressive saccades & fewer skips than young Chinese

Question 11

What is prebycusis?

Answer 11

Age related hearing loss caused by environmental exposures (lifetime continuous mild noise exposure, medication side effects, repeated high decibel trauma etc)
Animals under controlled conditions still suffer from hearing loss

Question 12

What did Cruickshanks et al (2010) find when looking at hearing loss?

Answer 12

Hearing impairment rate increases with age

Question 13

What is the process of hearing?

Answer 13

Sound waves enter via outer ear & travel through ear canal
Eardrum vibrates, sending vibrations to middle ear bones, which amplify vibrations
Send to cochlea , causing hair cells to move up & down
Stereocilia ontop of hair bump against structures, causing channels to open, creating electric signal
Auditory nerve carries signal to nerve

Question 14

What are biological changes in prebycusis?

Answer 14

Loss of hair cells
Loss of spiral ganglion cells in rosenthals canal (cochlea)
Changes in blood supply to ear

Question 15

What is the speech recognition threshold model?

Answer 15

Signal to noise ratio
Relative strength of signal compared to background noise
Plomp (1978;86) - older need higher signal to noise - reflect additional distortion beyond hearing loss

Question 16

How did Shvartzman et al (2022) look at hearing loss & speech perception?

Answer 16

Older adults with hearing loss have less accurate speech perception in silence & in noise

Question 17

What did Haegerstrom-Portnoy et al (1999) find about acuity?

Answer 17

Both high & low contrast acuity decline with age

Question 18

How does contrast sensitivity change?

Answer 18

Declines with age, starting at 50
Decline is particularly pronounced in high frequencies

Question 19

How did Lott et al (2001) look at vision & reading?

Answer 19

58-102 with good acuity
Significant correlations between measures of contrast sensitivity and corrected reading rate
Visual abilities correlated with reading speed

Question 20

What studies have looked at visual functioning & speech understanding?

Answer 20

Irion et al (1971) - young adults who scored well on lip reading had better acuity than worse performers
Hickson et al (2004) - older adults benefited from both audio & visual input compared to audio only when perceiving speech
No correlation between near/ distance acuity & benefit

Question 21

How did Ballard et al (2001) examine visuomotor control?

Answer 21

Examined control of lower lip, jaw & larynx
Used body parts to track moving target on screen - without imposing linguistic demands
Accuracy of older worse than younger adults

Question 22

How did Park et al (2007) examine age related cognitive changes?

Answer 22

345 ppts with larger cognitive test battery
Agre related decrease in processing speed, EM, LTM & STM
Verbal knowledge performance increases with age

Question 23

What did Ben-David et al (2015) find when examining vocabulary?

Answer 23

1299 young & 737 older adults who scored
Older adults outperformed younger ones AMH vocab test consistently

Question 24

Why might vocab increase with age?

Answer 24

More education
Increased exposure to different words, in different contexts
30,000 words per day exposure

Question 25

How did Singer et al (2003) look at vocab?

Answer 25

513 70-103 yrs
Assessed at baseline, 4yrs & 6yrs later
Processing speed, episodic memory, fluency & knowledge assessed
Decline in vocabulary in oldest old

Question 26

What are age differences in attention?

Answer 26

Verhaegen & Cerella (2002) found no age differences in selecting relevant info or task switching attention
Age difference in tasks involving maintenance of 2 distinct mental tasks

Question 27

How does the dual-task paradigm contribute to age related changes in language?

Answer 27

Performance in dual conditions is lower, suggesting 2 tasks compete for processing resources

Question 28

How did Tun et al (1991) look at age related language changes?

Answer 28

Speech task & reaction time task (varied in difficulty)
Single or dual condition
If older have more limited attention should experience more difficulty in dual
Costs of divided attention broadly similar in older & younger - similar attentional resources in old & young

Question 29

How does WM differ with age?

Answer 29

Declines with age
Difficulties can make it difficult to resolve complex sentences
Important in computing semantic & syntactic relations between words, phrases & sentences to crease understanding

Question 30

How did Kemper et al (2004) look at WM?

Answer 30

Younger & older with high/ low WM span
Low span readers made more regressions & longer viewing times with complex sentences with temporal ambiguities (any age)

Question 31

What is processing speed theory (generalised slowing) (Salthouse, 1996)?

Answer 31

As we age, decrease in processing speed
Suggested major contributor to adult age differences in cognition
Affects functioning through limited time mechanisms (operations executed too slowly in allocated time) & simultaneous mechanism (slow processes reduces info for high processing)

Question 32

What is the transmission deficit hypothesis (MacKay & Burke, 1990)?

Answer 32

Language perception & production dependent on strength of connections within language & memory systems
Nodes in language systems have different subtypes of semantic, phonological & orthographical
Nodes can be primed - rate of priming transmission dependent on strength of connection between nodes
Ageing weakens connections, causing transmission deficits

Question 33

How did Winefield et al (2006) show cognitive & sensory ability interactions?

Answer 33

4 groups - old/ young normal hearing, old/ young mild-to-moderate hearing loss
Speech rate manipulated
Little difference for simple sentence comprehension accuracy
Age & hearing loss associated with poor comprehension of complex sentences, especially at higher speech rate

Question 34

What is the common cause hypothesis?

Answer 34

General factor underlies the decline in both sensory processing & congnition

Question 35

What is the effortful/ information degredation hypothesis?

Answer 35

More cognitive resources needed to successfully percieve degraded input (Rabbitt, 1968)
Sensory decline in older age means sensory input degraded - more resources needed to perceive it

Question 36

How did Tun et al (2009) look at info degradation hypothesis in relation to dual task paradigm?

Answer 36

4 groups, young/old good hearing, young/ old poor hearing
Single task tracking & single task recall - dual was both together
Older adults with poor hearing had larger dual task costs
Speech perception = more effortful when hearing is poor

Question 37

How do tip-of-the-tongue effects occur in transmission deficit hypothesis?

Answer 37

Result from top-down deficit in transmission
Lexical node is activated but top-down activation of phonological node doesn’t occur due to weak connections