Lecture 5 - Physical Fitness and Language Decline

Question 1

Healthy ageing comes with?

Answer 1

Cognitive decline

Question 2

Which type of matter declines later and doesn’t decline as much?

Answer 2

White matter declines later than grey matter, and does not decline quite as much.

Question 3

What did Colcombe and Kramer’s (2003) meta analysis find about exercise and cognitive ability?

Answer 3

Reviewed studies which implemented physical interventions to PPS, making them partake in physical fitness training.

Experimental groups receiving training had far more cognitive benefits, including in executive, control, spatial and speed domains.

Question 4

As you age, your semantic memory?

Answer 4

Increases.

Question 5

Tip-of-the-tongue experiences are what?

Answer 5

• not associated with memory loss

- indicative of a problem with accessing phonology.

Question 6

How would tip of the tongue experiences typically be measured experimentally?

Answer 6

PPS would be shown definitions, and would have to generate the word that the definition relates to.

Question 7

What did Segaert et al., (2017) find about physical fitness and language ability?

Answer 7

Elderly participants experienced more ToTs. Low-fit elderly experienced almost double ToTs than high fit elderly.

When experiencing ToTs, young people were able to access more phonological information than elderly participants.

Question 8

What is the mechanism between higher fitness levels and increased linguistic ability?

Answer 8

Increased fitness relates to increased cardiovascular fitness.

Increased cardiovascular fitness improves brain function (blood flow, etc) and structure (losing less white & grey matter).

Question 9

Number of Tip of the Tongue experiences people have is related to what brain region?

Answer 9

Grey matter volume in the left insula.

Question 10

What does ToT refer to?

Answer 10

The tip of the tongue phenomenon; being able to say a word when you can simultaneously remember what it means. When semantic information is present, but phonological information is not.

Question 11

What are interlopers?

Answer 11

(often phonologically) related words that are activated when trying to think of a word that is on the tip of the tongue.

Question 12

ToT supports which model?

Answer 12

2 stage lexicalisation model

Question 13

What is the lemma of a word?

Answer 13

The meaning/syntactic information.

Question 14

What is the lexeme of a word?

Answer 14

The sound/phonology of a word.

Question 15

What are the two theories explaining the tip of the tongue phenomenon?

Answer 15

Blocking Hypothesis (Jones & Langford, 1987)
Partial activation hypothesis (Brown, 1970)

Question 16

How does the Blocking hypothesis explain the tip of the tongue phenomenon?

Answer 16

Activation of interlopers (related words) prevent activation of the right word.

Question 17

How does the Partial activation hypothesis explain the tip of the tongue phenomenon?

Answer 17

Weak links between the lemma and lexeme mean that activation of the lemma does not always lead to activation of the lexeme.

Question 18

What is the evidence that suggests blocking theory is not completely accurate?

Answer 18

Words with more phonologically related neighbours result in less, not more, ToTs (Harley & Brown, 1998).

Presenting a phonological neighbour reduces blocking and aids recall of lexeme information (James & Burke, 2000).

Question 19

Do bi-lingual speakers experience more or less ToTs?

Answer 19

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