The effect of Social Isolation on Lexical Retrieval in Elderly Adults

项目摘要/摘要 想出我们想说的词(词汇检索)在老年人中是一个令人担忧的问题。那些拥有 痴呆症自然会在词汇提取任务中遇到困难，但典型的老年人也是如此。他们可能会 与人名抗争，也与物语抗争。此外，虽然问题主要出现在 低频词，有时甚至在词很熟悉的时候也会出现。这样的词汇化问题 由于社会孤立导致的说话机会的缺乏，检索似乎变得更加复杂 在21世纪的北美，经常伴随着老龄化，我们认为，尤其是在 在2020年陪伴了许多人的新冠肺炎。在这个项目中，我们使用一个精细化的任务来诱导舌尖 (TOT)体验并预测在该任务中的表现将与社会隔离程度相关 我们的参与者已经忍受了。此外，这种沟通失误的增加可能会导致挫折感， 谈话中的崩溃，以及自相矛盾的是，为了避免 对沟通无能的看法。尽管我们的工作取得了实质性的进展 了解社会隔离及其对老年认知的影响，可以确定的范围 仅从认知表现的衡量标准来看是有限的。最重要的是，我们还不知道 由于在单词检索方面的社交孤立，导致交流减少。在研究1中，我们建议重新测试53个 健康的参与者在新冠肺炎之前的一段时间里对TOT刺激进行了不同项目的测试，使用 他们在之前的测试中没有看到的项目。关于社交和沟通交流变化的自我报告 由于新冠肺炎将允许我们衡量社交关系的变化是否会影响找词能力。我们 假设在第二次测试中较差的单词发现将与社交程度呈正相关 与世隔绝，与社会交往的程度呈负相关。在研究2中，我们将进行一项更大的、 关于寻词困难的社会隔离和交流机会的回顾研究。 我们将利用研究1中的方法，并将其推广到更广泛、更具代表性的健康老年人队列中 成年人。我们 假设参与需要有表现力的语言的社交活动的参与者 我们的词汇检索测量更好，交流交流的机会将是负面的 与社会孤立程度相关。我们的发现将对公众健康产生重大影响，因为它们 将提供社会孤立如何影响交流的衡量标准，并在未来的努力中使之成为可能 以提高健康老年人和痴呆症患者的语言能力。

Project Summary/Abstract Coming up with the word we want to say (lexical retrieval) is a worrying concern among older adults. Those with dementia, naturally, experience difficulty on lexical-retrieval tasks, but typical older adults do as well. They may struggle with people’s names, but also with words for objects. Moreover, while the problems arise primarily for low-frequency words, they sometimes arise even when the word is quite familiar. Such problems with lexical retrieval appear to be compounded by the lack of speaking opportunities resulting from the social isolation that often accompanies aging in 21st century North America, and, we propose, particularly so by the extremes which have accompanied COVID-19 for many in 2020. In this project, we use a refined task to induce tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experiences and predict that performance on that task will correlate with the degree of social isolation which our participants have endured. Moreover, increases in such communication lapses can lead to frustration, breakdowns in conversation, and, paradoxically, a desire to withdraw from social interactions in order to avoid the perception of communicative incompetence. Although substantial advances have been made in our understanding of social isolation and its influence on cognition in aging, the scope of what can be determined from measures of cognitive performance alone is limited. Most crucially, we do not yet know the effects of reduction in communication due to social isolation on word retrieval. In Study 1, we propose to retest the 53 healthy participants tested for a different project in the period leading up to COVID-19 on TOT stimuli, using items they did not see in the earlier test. A self-report of changes in social contact and communicative exchanges due to COVID-19 will allow us to gauge whether a change in social connection impacts word-finding ability. We hypothesize that poorer word-finding at the second testing will correlate positively with the degree of social isolation and negatively with the extent of social communication. In Study 2 we will conduct a larger, retrospective study of social isolation and opportunities for communicative exchanges on word-finding difficulties. We will utilize the measures from Study 1 and extend them to a broader, representative cohort of healthy older adults. We hypothesize that participants involved in social activities that require expressive language will perform better on our lexical retrieval measure, and that opportunities for communicative exchange will be negatively correlated with social isolation levels. Our findings will have a significant impact on public health because they will provide measures of how social isolation can affect communication and, for future efforts, make it possible to improve the language abilities of both healthy seniors and those with dementia.