Department of Speech Language Pathology Faculty Articles
Title
Age-related differences in idiom production in adulthood
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2011
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.
Publication Title
Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics
ISSN
0269-9206
First Page
899
Last Page
912
DOI Number
10.3109/02699206.2011.584136
Volume
25
Issue
10
Recommended Citation
Conner, P. S.; Hyun, J.; O'Connor Wells, Barbara; Anema, I.; Goral, M.; Monereau-Merry, M.; Rubino, D.; Kuckuk, R.; and Obler, L. K., "Age-related differences in idiom production in adulthood" (2011). Department of Speech Language Pathology Faculty Articles. 4.
https://nsuworks.nova.edu/hpd_slp_facarticles/4
