Name agreement and naming latencies for typed picture naming in aging adults

ABSTRACT

This baseline study aimed to create a coherent set of images that can be used to describe language decline found in healthy elderly and to compare this to the language change found in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. To this extend, a typed picture naming task was created, in which visual complexity, age-of-acquisition, frequency and name agreement were controlled for. 76 healthy elderly participated in the test; their data will be used in follow-up studies to compare with cognitively impaired patients. The entire typing process was logged with keystroke logging tools Inputlog and Scriptlog; the obtained results were analysed in light of the typing product (name agreement and object recognition) and the writing process (naming latencies and interkey latencies). Results showed that the latencies increased with age and that the older participants had longer latencies for images with a lower frequency and higher age-of-acquisition. Hence, our results indicate the need to take both the latencies and the typing product into consideration.

KEYWORDS:

• Language decline
• keystroke logging
• picture naming

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the research fund BOF-DOCPRO 2015, PS ID: 31661 of the University of Antwerp. We would also like to thank Eric Van Horenbeeck, the technical coordinator of Inputlog, and Luuk Van Waes, co-founder of Inputlog and the typing task. We thank Johan Frid and Victoria Johansson, respectively the technical coordinator and co-founder of Scriptlog for creating a Scriptlog module especially for our research purposes. Further thanks go to Peter Mariën and Dorien Vandenborre for their input during the design of the study. Iris Schrijver receives thanks for the revision of this article. Last but not least we would like to thank the elderly who enthusiastically participated in this study.

Disclosure Statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Notes

¹ Inputlog terminology: before word pause.

² Inputlog terminology: within word pause.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Universiteit Antwerpen [BOF-DOCPRO 2015, PS ID: 31661];