Our new article has just been published in the journal Experimental Aging Research. In this study, we investigated the question of whether word finding difficulties among older adults may be partially due to age-related declines in cognitive control. In a sample of 264 cognitively healthy monolingual older adults, we found that individual differences in executive functions predicted word retrieval speed and accuracy on an object-naming and an action-naming test. In particular, mental set-shifting abilities predicted retrieval accuracy on both tests while fluency (sometimes referred to as “efficiency of access to long-term memory”) predicted retrieval speed on both tests and accuracy for object naming.
This work was done with my colleagues from the Language in the Aging Brain lab at the VA Hospital in Jamaica Plain, MA. I am currently conducting a follow-up study at the University of California, Riverside exploring the relation between cognitive control and word retrieval in bilingual and monolingual older adults to elucidate the independent effects of aging and bilingual experience on word retrieval, cognition, and brain structure and function.
The full-text of the article is available here: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/xHvsuP8tYDzPX4x8DYXX/full?target=10.1080/0361073X.2019.1627492 and on my Publications page.
Eve Higby 