Using concept typicality to explore semantic representation and control in healthy ageing

Alves, Mara; Figueiredo, Patrícia; Roberto, Magda Sofia; Raposo, Ana

doi:10.1007/s10339-021-01024-7

Cited by 6 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 88 publications

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“…Thus, older participants had greater difficulty efficiently retrieving features of concepts that were less salient to conceptual identity and that require high levels of controlled processing (Lambon Ralph et al, 2017). To our knowledge, only a few studies have investigated the age-related effect on semantic control and found mixed evidence: Some studies reported that the selection process declines with aging (Hoffman, 2018(Hoffman, , 2019, while studies on controlled retrieval argued for its preservation (Alves et al, 2021;Hoffman, 2018). These latter studies observed that older participants had a similar performance to their young counterparts, suggesting a preserved controlled retrieval of weaker information from the semantic store (Alves et al, 2021;Hoffman, 2018Hoffman, , 2019.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To our knowledge, only a few studies have investigated the age-related effect on semantic control and found mixed evidence: Some studies reported that the selection process declines with aging (Hoffman, 2018, 2019), while studies on controlled retrieval argued for its preservation (Alves et al, 2021; Hoffman, 2018). These latter studies observed that older participants had a similar performance to their young counterparts, suggesting a preserved controlled retrieval of weaker information from the semantic store (Alves et al, 2021; Hoffman, 2018, 2019). Our results speak against previous evidence, suggesting that controlled retrieval follows the same fate as the semantic selection process in aging.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The literature on semantic control in aging is scanty and controversial. Indeed, a small number of behavioral studies (Alves et al, 2021;Hoffman, 2018Hoffman, , 2019 investigated the aging effect on the semantic control processes. These studies agreed in reporting that older participants performed worse than younger participants when selecting among competing semantic representations (Hoffman, 2018(Hoffman, , 2019, while controlled retrieval processes did not differ between age groups (Alves et al, 2021;Hoffman, 2018Hoffman, , 2019.…”

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confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Aging-related effects on the controlled retrieval of semantic information.

Ambrosini¹,

Peressotti²,

Gennari³

et al. 2023

Psychology and Aging

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The efficient use of knowledge requires semantic control processes to retrieve context-relevant information. So far, it is well-established that semantic knowledge, as measured with vocabulary tests, does not decline with aging. Yet, it is still unclear whether controlled retrieval—the context-driven retrieval of very specific aspects of semantic knowledge—deteriorates in aging, following the same fate as other forms of cognitive control. Here, we tackled this issue by comparing the performance of younger and older native Italian speakers during a semantic feature verification task. To manipulate the control demands, we parametrically varied the semantic salience of the target feature for the cue concept. As compared to their young counterparts, older adults showed worse performance (in terms of reaction times) as the salience of the target feature of the concept decreased. This result suggests that older people have relatively greater difficulties in regulating the activation within semantic representation when conditions pose high demands of controlled retrieval of semantic information.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Aging-related effects on the controlled retrieval of semantic information.

Ambrosini¹,

Peressotti²,

Gennari³

et al. 2023

Psychology and Aging

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“…Thus, older participants had a reduced ability to efficiently retrieve features of concepts that were less salient to the conceptual identity, conditions which require high levels of controlled processing as proposed by the controlled semantic cognition framework (Ralph et al, 2017). As far as we know, only just a few studies have investigated the age-related effect on semantic control and found mixed evidence: while it seems that the selection process declines in aging (Hoffman, 2018(Hoffman, , 2019, there is no substantial evidence for an age-dependent decline (or sparing) of controlled retrieval (Alves et al, 2021;Hoffman, 2018).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aging-related effects on the controlled retrieval of semantic information

Ambrosini¹,

Peressotti²,

Gennari³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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The efficient use of knowledge requires semantic control processes to retrieve context-relevant information. So far, it is well established that semantic knowledge, as measured with vocabulary tests, do not decline in aging. Yet, it is still unclear if controlled retrieval -the context-driven retrieval of very specific aspects of semantic knowledge- declines in aging, following the same fate of other forms of cognitive control. Here, we tackled this issue by comparing the performance of younger and older native Italian speakers during a semantic feature verification task. To manipulate the control demands, we parametrically varied the semantic significance, a measure of the salience of the target feature for the cue concept. As compared to their young counterparts, older adults showed a greater performance disruption (in terms of reaction times) as the significance value of the target feature decreased. This result suggests that older people have difficulties in regulating the activation within semantic representation, such that they fail to handle non-dominant (or weakly activated) yet task-relevant semantic information.

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“…Having a range of category types and instance typicality may prove to be useful in indexing how different groups cope with mapping local information to a more general gestalt. For example, the results of two recent studies that used either a semantic categorization or a verification task and varied membership typicality (Alves et al, 2021) or semantic significance (Ambrosini et al, 2021) revealed age related differences in this ability. It would be interesting to determine whether such effects are apparent in the current monitoring task (see Limitations and outlook, below).…”

Section: Higher-level Processesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developing a Real-Time Test to Investigate Conversational Speech Understanding

Buchholz

Davis

Beadle

et al. 2022

J Speech Lang Hear Res

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Purpose: This study aimed to develop and test a measure of real-time continuous speech understanding to be used with natural dialogues. Method: The measure was based on a category monitoring paradigm and employed five existing recordings of natural dialogues from which the different test categories and associated target words were derived. For each dialogue, a listener was first given a semantic category and asked to press a button as quickly as possible whenever they heard an instance of the category. We tested 63 younger adults, using five semantic categories (family, media, season, temperature, and travel) at three noise levels (in quiet, 0 dB, and −5 dB signal-to-noise ratio [SNR]). Performance was measured in terms of accuracy and response time. Results: The results showed clear differences between the three noise conditions regardless of the semantic category. The peak of the response distribution was highest and earliest for the quiet condition and was reduced with decreasing SNR. The responses varied across categories, reflecting differences in the complexity of a given category or the typicality of the association between target words and their category. Broad categories and/or target words that were less directly associated with their category had decreased hit rates and increased response times. Conclusion: The results were discussed in terms of the sensitivity (hit rate) of the performance measure, as well as whether it picked up higher level semantic, context, and discourse properties of the dialogues. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21561681

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Using concept typicality to explore semantic representation and control in healthy ageing

Cited by 6 publications

References 88 publications

Aging-related effects on the controlled retrieval of semantic information.

Aging-related effects on the controlled retrieval of semantic information.

Aging-related effects on the controlled retrieval of semantic information

Developing a Real-Time Test to Investigate Conversational Speech Understanding

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