title: 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.
authors: Program in Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016, USA. psconner@gmail.com
authors: Peggy S
authors: PS
authors: Conner
authors: Jungmoon
authors: J
authors: Hyun
authors: Barbara
authors: B
authors: O'Connor Wells
authors: Inge
authors: I
authors: Anema
authors: Mira
authors: M
authors: Goral
authors: Marie-Michelle
authors: MM
authors: Monéreau-Merry
authors: Daniel
authors: D
authors: Rubino
authors: Raija
authors: R
authors: Kuckuk
authors: Loraine K
authors: LK
authors: Obler
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D007806:Language Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology*; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012660:Semantics; D055815:Young Adult