Events
Language Science Lecture Series
Jamie Reilly
Temple University
Tuesday, October 7, 2025
12:30 p.m.–2 p.m.
Humanities Center, Conference Room D
Abstract word retrieval and alignment in conversation across the span of adulthood: In a race between age-associated executive decline and vocabulary growth, who wins?
Aging is associated with a paradoxical combination of vocabulary growth and declining executive functions. It is unclear how the interaction between vocabulary knowledge and reduced processing manifests in a naturalistic language task such as conversation. We analyzed >1500 unscripted conversations (>8 million words) between speakers of different ages (18-66) using a newly developed software application, ConversationAlign. We specifically focused on concrete versus abstract word retrieval and lexical alignment as functions of age differences between conversation partners. Aging was robustly associated with abstract word dropout, and age differences between interlocutors were associated with growing misalignment on word concreteness. We will discuss how these observed patterns inform our understanding of patterns of age-based lexical retrieval during naturalistic communication.
Learn more about Jamie Reilly's Concepts and Cognition Laboratory.