Abstract and concrete noun processing in healthy older adults using fMRI

Sandberg, Chaleece and Kiran, Swathi (2009) Abstract and concrete noun processing in healthy older adults using fMRI. [Clinical Aphasiology Paper]

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Abstract

Normal subjects and patients with aphasia exhibit a 'concreteness effect' during lexical tasks. Recent evidence from neuroimaging studies suggests possible dissociable neural correlates for processing abstract versus concrete words. However, these studies have only been conducted with healthy young adults. This study used fMRI to examine neural activations of abstract and concrete word processing in healthy older adults during a lexical-decision task and a word-judgment task. These results indicate that a) neural activation patterns for concrete versus abstract words are task-specific, and b) healthy older adults show more bilateral activation than healthy young adults during abstract and concrete word processing.

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