Naming Nouns and Verbs in Older Adults – Age-Related Changes

Research data on pathological language degradation suggest noun-verb dissociation, whichprompts research in the field of normal aging in this direction. However, there are few studiesin the literature that address semantic deterioration in the domain of verbs and therelationship between difficulties in naming these two types of content words during normalaging. The aim of the research was to compare the naming of verbs and nouns in healthyolder adults and to qualitatively analyse the differences and errors in naming. The sampleconsisted of 101 participants without a history of neurological diseases, divided into 3 agedecades. The Boston Naming Test was used as an instrument to assess noun naming, and theAction Naming Task was used to assess verb naming. Results from the whole sample showedthat males performed better on both noun and verb naming (p<.05), and that highereducational level had an effect on the older adults' better performance. Comparative analysisrevealed that participants had more difficulty naming nouns than verbs. Analysis of changesbetween age groups showed significant differences in the number of correct and omittedresponses only in the area of naming objects (p<.05), while these differences were not foundin the naming of verbs (p>.05). The results of our study show a significant semanticdeterioration with age in the noun domain, but not in the verb domain. This could be aconsequence of the different organization of nouns and verbs in the mental lexicon,supported by different brain regions and neural networks

Naming Nouns and Verbs in Older Adults – Age-Related Changes Keywords:

Noun Naming , Verb Naming , Healthy Aging , Semantic Deterioration