The Effect of Social Isolation on Lexical Retrieval in Elderly Adults

Project Summary/Abstract Coming up with the word we want to say (lexical retrieval) is a worrying concern among older adults. Those with dementia, naturally, experience difficulty on lexical-retrieval tasks, but typical older adults do as well. They may struggle with people's names, but also with words for objects. Moreover, while the problems arise primarily for low-frequency words, they sometimes arise even when the word is quite familiar. Such problems with lexical retrieval appear to be compounded by the lack of speaking opportunities resulting from the social isolation that often accompanies aging in 21st century North America, and, we propose, particularly so by the extremes which have accompanied COVID-19 for many in 2020. In this project, we use a refined task to induce tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experiences and predict that performance on that task will correlate with the degree of social isolation which our participants have endured. Moreover, increases in such communication lapses can lead to frustration, breakdowns in conversation, and, paradoxically, a desire to withdraw from social interactions in order to avoid the perception of communicative incompetence. Although substantial advances have been made in our understanding of social isolation and its influence on cognition in aging, the scope of what can be determined from measures of cognitive performance alone is limited. Most crucially, we do not yet know the effects of reduction in communication due to social isolation on word retrieval. In Study 1, we propose to retest the 53 healthy participants tested for a different project in the period leading up to COVID-19 on TOT stimuli, using items they did not see in the earlier test. A self-report of changes in social contact and communicative exchanges due to COVID-19 will allow us to gauge whether a change in social connection impacts word-finding ability. We hypothesize that poorer word-finding at the second testing will correlate positively with the degree of social isolation and negatively with the extent of social communication. In Study 2 we will conduct a larger, retrospective study of social isolation and opportunities for communicative exchanges on word-finding difficulties. We will utilize the measures from Study 1 and extend them to a broader, representative cohort of healthy older adults. We hypothesize that participants involved in social activities that require expressive language will perform better on our lexical retrieval measure, and that opportunities for communicative exchange will be negatively correlated with social isolation levels. Our findings will have a significant impact on public health because they will provide measures of how social isolation can affect communication and, for future efforts, make it possible to improve the language abilities of both healthy seniors and those with dementia.