Lexical Diversity in Younger and Older Adults: Effect of Lexical Retrieval Strategy (Evidence From Sentence Completion)

Previous studies have revealed that healthy older adults experience a slowdown in multiple linguistic tasks compare to younger adults due to changes in brain structure as well as behavioural changes associated with aging. The present study benefits from sentence completion technique in investigating the trade-off between lexical diversity and time in two age categories in a task where creativity is required. 20 younger adults and 20 older adults complete 120 sentences from a Russian Normative Database of Sentence Completion. The instructions explicitly state that participants need to provide a grammatically and semantically plausible ending for each context which they think will likely be different from others taking part in the same experiment, thus inhibiting most intuitive ending. The time taken to produce each response was then measured and the diversity of responses for every single test item was assessed. We compared the lexical diversity in both groups and also tested for correlation between each person's originality on a sentence completion task and performance on Stroop task and Creative drawing task of each participant.