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Rapid Novel Word Learning in Young but Not Older Adults: ERP Evidence from Taiwan Mandarin
Poster Session A, Wednesday, September 30, 11:00 am - 1:00 pm, Wangari Maathai
Nianke Cai1, Po-Heng Chen1, Yi-Chun Ko1, Min-Peng Kuo1, Chia-Lin Lee1; 1National Taiwan University
Human language constantly evolves, with words acquiring new meanings and new forms continually entering the lexicon. In young adults, a single exposure to a novel word in a strongly semantically constraining context can be sufficient for rapid encoding of a new meaning–form association in English. Older adults can acquire new meanings for existing English words following repeated exposures and active written production, although typically with lower accuracy than younger adults. However, online neurophysiological evidence remains limited for languages that rely heavily on character-based information (e.g., Taiwan Mandarin), and it is unclear whether older adults appreciate newly coined words as rapidly as younger adults. This Event-Related Potential (ERP) study examined novel word learning in highly constraining sentence contexts in healthy young and older native speakers of Taiwan Mandarin. Novel words and matched real words appeared sentence-finally following moderately to highly constraining contexts (mean constraint = .76, range = .45–1). All novel words were semantically opaque disyllabic compounds, ensuring that interpretation could depend only on contextual integration. Thirty-six young adults (18 females; age range = 20–30 years, M = 23.8) and thirty-two older adults (20 females; age range = 65–86 years, M = 71.8) passively read sentences presented word-by-word. Every 16 sentences, participants completed a semantic relatedness task using previously encountered sentence-final words served as primes. Targets were real words that were identical (following real-word primes) / synonymous (following novel-word primes), related, or unrelated to the primes. Both groups performed near ceiling for real-word primes (young/older: identical = .99/.97; related = .96/.91; unrelated = .98/.92). For novel-word primes, young adults showed sensitivity to the newly inferred contextual meanings in the synonymous condition, whereas older adults performed at or below chance in both the synonymous and related conditions (synonymous = .69/.51; related = .51/.35; unrelated = .85/.79). ERP results time-locked to target onset revealed graded N400 effects for real-word primes in both groups, with unrelated targets eliciting the largest N400 responses, followed by related targets and then identical targets, indicating preserved semantic knowledge for existing words. By contrast, following novel-word primes, young adults showed attenuated but reliable N400 reductions for synonymous and related targets, suggesting rapid but maybe shallower integration of novel meanings after a single exposure. In contrast, older adults showed no reliable N400 modulation following novel-word primes. These findings replicate and extend previous findings from English, demonstrating that young adults can rapidly acquire novel word meanings from contextual information despite Taiwan Mandarin’s strong reliance on character-level processing. By contrast, older adults showed little evidence of immediate meaning–form mapping and meaning acquisition following a single exposure. Together with previous findings showing successful learning after repeated exposure in older adults, the present results suggest that aging may particularly affect the rapid online integration of novel word forms with newly inferred meanings.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Lexical Semantics,