Abstract
The field of cognitive aging has seen considerable advances in describing the linguistic and semantic changes that happen during the adult life span to uncover the structure of the mental lexicon (i.e., the mental repository of lexical and conceptual representations). Nevertheless, there is still debate concerning the sources of these changes, including the role of environmental exposure and several cognitive mechanisms associated with learning, representation, and retrieval of information. We review the current status of research in this field and outline a framework that promises to assess the contribution of both ecological and psychological aspects to the aging lexicon.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 686-698 |
Number of pages | 13 |
Journal | Trends in Cognitive Sciences |
Volume | 23 |
Issue number | 8 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Aug 1 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We thank Laura Wiles for editing the manuscript, Paul Hoffman for providing us with Figure I in Box 2 , and the Swiss National Science Foundation for funding the Symposium on the Aging Lexicon ( http://p3.snf.ch/project-180495 ).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 The Authors
Keywords
- aging
- ecological analyses
- network models
- representation
- search
- semantic cognition