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A behavioral investigation of abstract semantic processing in aging across semantic knowledge, retrieval, and selection
Poster Session A, Wednesday, September 30, 11:00 am - 1:00 pm, Wangari Maathai
Shao-yi Chang1, Yuya Huang1, Jinyi Hung1; 1MacKay Medical University
Abstract concepts rely heavily on linguistics, contextual, and social experiences and are therefore thought to be processed differently from concrete concepts. Although semantic knowledge is often considered relatively preserved in healthy aging, it remains unclear how different components of abstract semantic processing are influenced by aging, particularly under varying semantic control demands. This study investigated whether age-related differences in abstract semantic processing vary across semantic knowledge, retrieval, and selection processes. We hypothesized that abstract semantic knowledge would be relatively preserved in older adults, whereas age-related differences would become more pronounced as semantic control demands increased. Fifteen young adults (mean = 20.2, SD = 1.7) and fifteen healthy older adults (mean = 70.7, SD = 6.0) participated in three behavioral experiments: Experiment 1 used a synonym judgment task to assess abstract semantic knowledge, consisting of related (synonyms) and unrelated (non-synonyms) conditions. Experiments 2 employed a global association task to examine controlled semantic retrieval by manipulating association strength. Low-control trials contained strongly associated word pairs, whereas high-control trials required retrieval of weak semantic associations. Experiment 3 used a feature matching task to assess semantic selection demands. In low-control trials, probes and distractors were weakly related, whereas in high-control trials, distractors were strongly associated with probes but mismatched the target feature, thereby increasing competition among semantic representations. In both tasks, semantic associations were quantified using Word2Vec cosine similarity derived from a Mandarin Chinese corpus. Abstract semantic features, including emotional, social, temporal, and spatial dimensions, were selected based on normative ratings from the Six Semantic Dimension Database. Overall, younger adults showed significantly higher accuracy and faster reaction times than older adults across all tasks. High-control conditions also produced lower accuracy and longer reaction times than low-control conditions, confirming successful manipulation of semantic control demands. In the synonym judgment task, a significant group × condition interaction was found for accuracy (p = .001), with older adults showing disproportionately lower accuracy in the unrelated condition (OA =0.72 vs. YA = 0.96). In the global association task, no significant group x condition interaction was observed for either accuracy or reaction time, although younger adults consistently outperformed older adults across conditions. However, in the feature matching task, a significant group x condition interaction was found in accuracy (p = .03). Older adults showed substantially lower accuracy than younger adults, particularly in the high-control condition (OA = 0.56 vs. YA = 0.86). The findings suggest that age-related differences in abstract semantic processing are not uniform across semantic processes. While semantic control manipulations affected performance across groups, feature-based selection demands appeared particularly vulnerable to aging, highlighting semantic selection as a potentially sensitive component of semantic aging.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Lexical Semantics,