AUTHOR=Roxbury Tracy , McMahon Katie , Coulthard Alan , Copland David A. 

TITLE=An fMRI Study of Concreteness Effects during Spoken Word Recognition in Aging. Preservation or Attenuation?

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience

VOLUME=7

YEAR=2016

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/aging-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnagi.2015.00240

DOI=10.3389/fnagi.2015.00240

ISSN=1663-4365

ABSTRACT=<p>It is unclear whether healthy aging influences concreteness effects (i.e., the processing advantage seen for concrete over abstract words) and its associated neural mechanisms. We conducted an fMRI study on young and older healthy adults performing auditory lexical decisions on concrete vs. abstract words. We found that spoken comprehension of concrete and abstract words appears relatively preserved for healthy older individuals, including the concreteness effect. This preserved performance was supported by altered activity in left hemisphere regions including the inferior and middle frontal gyri, angular gyrus, and fusiform gyrus. This pattern is consistent with age-related compensatory mechanisms supporting spoken word processing.</p>