Age-related differences in idiom production in adulthood

Abstract

To investigate whether idiom production was vulnerable to age-related difficulties, we asked 40 younger (ages 18–30) and 40 older healthy adults (ages 60–85) to produce idiomatic expressions in a story-completion task. Younger adults produced significantly more correct idiom responses (73%) than did older adults (60%). When older adults generated partially correct responses, they were less likely than younger participants to eventually produce the complete target idiom (old: 32%; young: 70%); first-word cues after initial failure to retrieve an idiom resulted in more correct idioms for older (24%) than younger (15%) participants. Correlations between age and idiom correctness were positive for the young group and negative for the older group, suggesting mastery of familiar idioms continues into adulthood. Within each group, scores on the Boston Naming Test correlated with performance on the idiom task. Findings for retrieving idiomatic expressions are thus similar to those for retrieving lexical items.

• idioms
• older adults
• age-related language changes
• retrieval

Acknowledgements

We extend our appreciation to our participants in this study and to the members of the Neurolinguistics Lab of the CUNY Graduate Center who gave their feedback and support during this research project. Special thanks to Brian Kohn, research assistant, who spent countless hours diligently transcribing the recordings of the sessions. Diana Van Lancker Sidtis, Tamara Rose and Mariah Johnson are gratefully acknowledged for their help in the initial stages of this investigation. Thanks also to our anonymous reviewers for their suggestions that have strengthened the article.

Declaration of interest: Work on parts of this project was partially funded by National Institutes of Health Grant # R01-AG 14345, Martin Albert, Principal Investigator. The authors report no additional declarations of interest.

Notes

1. Omission of these participants did not significantly change the means or standard deviations for demographics of age, education or gender for either of the groups. For the study group without these participants, the means were as follows: age – young: 25.4 (2.8), old: 72.1 (7.7); education – young: 15.8 (1.3), old: 16.1 (2.1); gender – young: 25F, 11M, old: 26F, 11M.

2. If the participant started to read the scenario aloud and then stopped part-way through to read silently, the examiner completed reading it aloud.