Symposium JLN : Résumé Obler

Loraine Obler
CUNY Graduate Center, New York

“Language Changes in Healthy Aging:
Underlying Cognitive, Health and Brain Factors”
 

While many aspects of language do not change with advancing age, lexical retrieval becomes slower (and sometimes blocked) and comprehension under imperfect conditions becomes more difficult. In this talk I contrast age-related increases in vocabulary with decline in lexical retrieval on confrontation-naming tasks and in discourse, and consider the factors linked to difficulties with comprehension (e.g., noise overlay, syntactic complexity, decreased redundancy). Further, I consider the underlying cognitive challenges that have been associated with these language changes (in working memory and executive functions) and, most recently, the healthrisk factors (hypertension) and bilateral brain structures linked to them.