ArticleCortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior2025
Abstract word dropout and cross-speaker misalignment of word concreteness are features of conversation in aging.
Article in Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- ConversationAlign: Open-source software for analyzing patterns of lexical use and alignment in conversation transcripts.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
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Abstract
Language development is significant for an abstractness shift where the early concrete lexicon of childhood steadily expands to incorporate abstract concepts (e.g., mental states, emotions, ideas). Much remains to be learned about the trajectories of concrete versus abstract words across the span of development, especially within the domain of discourse production. We investigated the prevalence of abstract word use in dyadic conversations between adults of different ages (range 18-66). Our aim was to adjudicate between two opposing trajectories of language use in normal cognitive aging. The vocabulary growth perspective holds that aging is associated with a steady accrual of vocabulary knowledge resulting in greater lexical diversity and a larger pool of abstract words to draw upon in conversation. In contrast, resource pruning predicts the opposite trajectory such that age-associated gains in vocabulary acquisition are offset by diminished executive resources. Since abstract words tend to have higher lexical retrieval demands than concrete words, normal aging will result in an apparent dropout of abstract words. Moreover, this concreteness effect will be amplified within a resource-intensive communication modality such as conversation. We analyzed distributions of abstract and concrete words and cross-speaker alignment within unscripted conversations between adults of different ages (N = 1565 conversations, >8 million words, age range 19-66). Aging was associated with abstract word dropout, and misalignment between conversation partners on concreteness expanded in parallel with their respective age differences. These results add to a growing body of research that implicates executive functioning in controlled lexical retrieval of abstract words. We discuss significance of these results for understanding intergenerational communication and relationships between aging, executive functioning, and lexical retrieval in high-level discourse.
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Registered trials
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