Age‐related differences in working memory (WM) components were investigated by manipulating the time interval and interference effects between phonological and semantic judgment tasks to identify tasks to best discriminate between younger and older groups. The 96 participants (young = 48; old = 48) prospectively performed two task types of WM, with phonological and semantic judgment tasks, which were administered while varying the three interval conditions: 1‐s unfilled (UF), 5‐s UF, and 5‐s filled (F). The main effect for age was significant in the semantic judgment task but not in the phonological judgment task. The main effect for the interval conditions were significant in both tasks. A 5‐s UF condition applied to a semantic judgment task could significantly differentiate the older group from the younger group. Differential effects of time interval manipulation in semantic and phonological processing are involved in WM resources. The older group could be differentiated by varying the task types and interval conditions, indicating that the semantic‐related WM burdens may contribute to a superior differential diagnosis of aging‐related WM decline.

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Objectives: This study was carried out to investigate the effects of Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA)-plus treatment on landmark naming difficulties of the elderly with subject memory impairment (SMI). Methods: Twenty-six Korean individuals aged 60 or older with SMI participated in this study, eleven participants were in the intervention group and fifteen individuals who matched their age and years of education made up the control group. The landmark naming intervention consisted of a total of 9 steps based on SFA, presenting photo stimuli of famous places in Korean or abroad. The intervention used in this study was performed 1:1 with the subject for 60 minutes per session with 16 sessions. Visual stimulation, semantic categories, and semantic features such as geographic location, were applied to promote the performance of naming. The researcher provided tasks and clues to facilitate activation of the semantic and phonological information of landmark names. Results: Results demonstrated that there were significant increases in the performance of the trained and untrained place proper names among the intervention group. There was no generalization effect of the object naming. Conclusion: The current study suggested that the naming treatment using place names was effective in activating the semantic network, facilitating phonological information output, and enhancing landmark naming abilities in people with subjective memory decline.

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to develop a storytelling-based assessment for aging and neurogenic disorders. We developed a story scenario and picture stimuli to be used in this assessment. Methods: In experiment 1, in order to select the most familiar folk-tale, familiarity and contents’ awareness, surveys were conducted for participants aged from their 20s to 60s. In experiment 2, for the scenario composition of the finally selected folk-tale, stories were collected from published books, and the initial scenarios and picture stimuli were produced based on the core content and Correct Information Unit. In experiment 3, a storytelling-based assessment was conducted for 147 young people and written data was collected. Based on the word-class analysis from the written data, scenarios and pictures were revised. In experiment 4, a total of 115 individuals (young: 60, elderly: 55) participated in the storytelling-based assessment and spoken data were collected. The final scenarios and picture stimuli were completed using the results of word-class analysis from the spoken data. Results: In the results of experiment 1, the Korean folk-tale ‘Heungbu-Nolbu’ was selected as the most familiar story. Through experiments 2 to 4, we completed the final scenario and picture stimuli which consists of eight episodes and contains a total of 24 sentences and 32 CIUs. Conclusion: Our result is meaningful in providing the theoretical evidence for the development of a Korean version of storytelling-based language assessment. It can be applied to various age groups and neurogenic disorders.