The Effect of Social Network Composition and Frequency of Contact on Lexical Retrieval in Older Adults

Poster Session A - Saturday, April 13, 2024, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Ye-Jee Jung^1,2 (yejee.jung@hunter.cuny.edu), Loraine Obler², D.H. Whalen^2,3, Aisha Haroun^1,2, Samsun Nahar^1,2, Amy Vogel-Eyny¹; ¹Hunter College, City University of New York, ²The Graduate Center, City University of New York, ³Yale University Child Study Center

The social isolation that often accompanies aging leads to a reduction in speaking opportunities and exacerbates lexical retrieval difficulties. Although substantial advances have been made in our understanding of social isolation and its influence on cognition in aging, we do not yet know the effects of reduction in communication due to social isolation on word retrieval. This ongoing study examines the role of the amount of social communication across various social network domains on word-finding difficulties seen in induced tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experiences. The current methodological approach will be discussed, including the selection of a TOT-inducing set of common and proper nouns, the TOT elicitation paradigm, and a novel modification of the Social Network Index (SNI; Cohen et al., 1997) that uniquely takes into account opportunities for communicative exchanges (“contact frequency”). To date, 9 healthy older adults (mage=73.56; meducation=18.00) completed a TOT task composed of 90 nouns and a modified Social Network Index (SNI; Cohen et al., 1997). Spearman rank correlation was used to calculate coefficients of each SNI predictor (size, diversity, contact frequency) with TOT occurrences. Preliminary findings indicate that there were no statistically significant associations (p >.05) between age and TOT rate with SNI predictors. Age: size (r = -0.7), diversity (r = -0.5) and frequency (r = -0.5); TOT rate: size (r = -0.3), frequency (r = -0.2), and diversity (r = 0.04). Most associations were non-significant but there was a trend (p = 0.06) whereby age negatively correlated with social network size; however, testing is ongoing.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Development & aging