Production of Inflected Novel Words in Older Adults With and Without Dementia.

While cognitive changes in aging and neurodegenerative disease have been widely studied, language changes in these populations are less well understood. Inflecting novel words in a language with complex inflectional paradigms provides a good opportunity to observe how language processes change in normal and abnormal aging. Studies of language acquisition suggest that children inflect novel words based on their phonological similarity to real words they already know. It is unclear whether speakers continue to use the same strategy when encountering novel words throughout the lifespan or whether adult speakers apply symbolic rules. We administered a simple speech elicitation task involving Finnish-conforming pseudo-words and real Finnish words to healthy older adults, individuals with mild cognitive impairment, and individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) to investigate inflectional choices in these groups and how linguistic variables and disease severity predict inflection patterns. Phonological resemblance of novel words to both a regular and an irregular inflectional type, as well as bigram frequency of the novel words, significantly influenced participants' inflectional choices for novel words among the healthy elderly group and people with AD. The results support theories of inflection by phonological analogy (single-route models) and contradict theories advocating for formal symbolic rules (dual-route models).

Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment.

Older adults are slower at recognizing visual objects than younger adults. The same is true for recognizing that a letter string is a real word. People with Alzheimer's disease (AD) or Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) demonstrate even longer responses in written word recognition than elderly controls. Despite the general tendency towards slower recognition in aging and neurocognitive disorders, certain characteristics of words influence word recognition speed regardless of age or neuropathology (e.g., a word's frequency of use). We present here a protocol for examining the influence of lexical characteristics on word recognition response times in a simple lexical decision experiment administered to younger and older adults and people with MCI or AD. In this experiment, participants are asked to decide as quickly and accurately as possible whether a given letter string is an actual word or not. We also describe mixed-effects models and principal components analysis that can be used to detect the influence of different types of lexical variables or individual characteristics of participants on word recognition speed.

Preferential Disruption of Auditory Word Representations in Primary Progressive Aphasia With the Neuropathology of FTLD-TDP Type A.

Four patients with primary progressive aphasia displayed a greater deficit in understanding words they heard than words they read, and a further deficiency in naming objects orally rather than in writing. All four had frontotemporal lobar degeneration-transactive response DNA binding protein Type A neuropathology, three determined postmortem and one surmised on the basis of granulin gene (GRN) mutation. These features of language impairment are not characteristic of any currently recognized primary progressive aphasia variant. They can be operationalized as manifestations of dysfunction centered on a putative auditory word-form area located in the superior temporal gyrus of the left hemisphere. The small size of our sample makes the conclusions related to underlying pathology and auditory word-form area dysfunction tentative. Nonetheless, a deeper assessment of such patients may clarify the nature of pathways that link modality-specific word-form information to the associations that mediate their recognition as concepts. From a practical point of view, the identification of these features in patients with primary progressive aphasia should help in the design of therapeutic interventions where written communication modalities are promoted to circumvent some of the oral communication deficits.

Effects of morphological family on word recognition in normal aging, mild cognitive impairment, and Alzheimer's disease.

Reading a word activates morphologically related words in the mental lexicon. People with Alzheimer's disease (AD) or Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) often have difficulty retrieving words, though the source of this problem is not well understood. To better understand the word recognition process in aging and in neurodegenerative disorders such as MCI and AD, we investigated the nature of the activation of morphologically related family members in 22 Finnish speakers with AD, 24 with MCI, and 17 cognitively healthy elderly. We presented Finnish monomorphemic (base form) nouns in a single-word lexical decision experiment to measure the speed of word recognition and its relation to morphological and lexical variables. Morphological variables included morphological family size (separate for compounds and derived words) and pseudo-morphological family size (including the set of words that have a partially overlapping form but that do not share an actual morpheme, e.g., pet and carpet, or corn and corner). Pseudo-morphological family size was included to examine the influence of words with orthographic (or phonological) overlap that are not semantically related to the target words. Our analyses revealed that younger and elderly controls and individuals with MCI or AD were influenced by true morphological overlap (overlapping forms that also share meaning), as well as by the word's pseudo-morphological family. However, elderly controls and individuals with MCI or AD seemed to rely more on form overlap than young adults. This demonstrates that an increased reliance on form-based aspects of language processing in Alzheimer's disease is not necessarily due to a partial loss of access to semantics, but might be explained in part by a common age-related change of processes in written word recognition.

Word comprehension in temporal cortex and Wernicke area: A PPA perspective.

OBJECTIVE: To explore atrophy-deficit correlations of word comprehension and repetition in temporoparietal cortices encompassing the Wernicke area, based on patients with primary progressive aphasia (PPA). METHODS: Cortical thickness in regions within and outside the classical Wernicke area, measured by FreeSurfer, was correlated with repetition and single word comprehension scores in 73 right-handed patients at mild to moderate stages of PPA. RESULTS: Atrophy in the Wernicke area was correlated with repetition (r = 0.42, p = 0.001) but not single word comprehension (r = -0.072, p = 0.553). Correlations with word comprehension were confined to more anterior parts of the temporal lobe, especially its anterior third (r = 0.60, p < 0.001). A single case with postmortem autopsy illustrated preservation of word comprehension but not repetition 6 months prior to death despite nearly 50% loss of cortical volume and severe neurofibrillary degeneration in core components of the Wernicke area. CONCLUSIONS: Temporoparietal cortices containing the Wernicke area are critical for language repetition. Contrary to the formulations of classic aphasiology, their role in word and sentence comprehension is ancillary rather than critical. Thus, the Wernicke area is not sufficient to sustain word comprehension if the anterior temporal lobe is damaged. Traditional models of the role of the Wernicke area in comprehension are based almost entirely on patients with cerebrovascular lesions. Such lesions also cause deep white matter destruction and acute network diaschisis, whereas progressive neurodegenerative diseases associated with PPA do not. Conceptualizations of the Wernicke area that appear to conflict, therefore, can be reconciled by considering the hodologic and physiologic differences of the underlying lesions.

How older adults use cognition in sentence-final word recognition.

This study examined the effects of executive control and working memory on older adults' sentence-final word recognition. The question we addressed was the importance of executive functions to this process and how it is modulated by the predictability of the speech material. To this end, we tested 173 neurologically intact adult native English speakers aged 55-84 years. Participants were given a sentence-final word recognition test in which sentential context was manipulated and sentences were presented in different levels of babble, and multiple tests of executive functioning assessing inhibition, shifting, and efficient access to long-term memory, as well as working memory. Using a generalized linear mixed model, we found that better inhibition was associated with higher accuracy in word recognition, while increased age and greater hearing loss were associated with poorer performance. Findings are discussed in the framework of semantic control and are interpreted as supporting a theoretical view of executive control which emphasizes functional diversity among executive components.

Age-related differences in idiom production in adulthood.

To investigate whether idiom production was vulnerable to age-related difficulties, we asked 40 younger (ages 18-30) and 40 older healthy adults (ages 60-85) to produce idiomatic expressions in a story-completion task. Younger adults produced significantly more correct idiom responses (73%) than did older adults (60%). When older adults generated partially correct responses, they were less likely than younger participants to eventually produce the complete target idiom (old: 32%; young: 70%); first-word cues after initial failure to retrieve an idiom resulted in more correct idioms for older (24%) than younger (15%) participants. Correlations between age and idiom correctness were positive for the young group and negative for the older group, suggesting mastery of familiar idioms continues into adulthood. Within each group, scores on the Boston Naming Test correlated with performance on the idiom task. Findings for retrieving idiomatic expressions are thus similar to those for retrieving lexical items.

Bilateral brain regions associated with naming in older adults.

To determine structural brain correlates of naming abilities in older adults, we tested 24 individuals aged 56-79 on two confrontation-naming tests (the Boston Naming Test (BNT) and the Action Naming Test (ANT)), then collected from these individuals structural Magnetic-Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) data. Overall, several regions showed that greater gray and white matter volume/integrity measures were associated with better task performance. Left peri-Sylvian language regions and their right-hemisphere counterparts, plus left mid-frontal gyrus correlated with accuracy and/or negatively with response time (RT) on the naming tests. Fractional anisotropy maps derived from DTI showed robust positive correlations with ANT accuracy bilaterally in the temporal lobe and in right middle frontal lobe, as well as negative correlations with BNT RT, bilaterally, in the white matter within middle and inferior temporal lobes. We conclude that those older adults with relatively better naming skills can rely on right-hemisphere peri-Sylvian and mid-frontal regions and pathways, in conjunction with left-hemisphere peri-Sylvian and mid-frontal regions, to achieve their success.

Semantic verbal fluency in two contrasting languages.

This cross-linguistic study investigated Semantic Verbal Fluency (SVF) performance in 30 American English-speaking and 30 Finnish-speaking healthy elderly adults with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Despite the different backgrounds of the participant groups, remarkable similarities were found between the groups in the overall SVF performance in two semantic categories (animals and clothes), in the proportions of words produced within the first half (30 seconds) of the SVF tasks, and in the variety of words produced for the categories. These similarities emerged despite the difference in the mean length of words produced in the two languages (with Finnish words being significantly longer than English words). The few differences found between the groups concerned the types and frequencies of the 10 most common words generated for the categories. It was concluded that culture and language differences do not contribute significantly to variability in SVF performance in healthy elderly people.