Abstract
We investigated the effects of age as well as the linked factors of education and bilingualism on confrontation naming in rural Kashmir by creating a culturally appropriate naming test with pictures of 60 objects. We recruited 48 cognitively normal participants whose ages ranged from 18 to 28 and from 60 to 85. Participants in our study were illiterate monolinguals (N = 18) and educated Kashmiri-Urdu bilinguals (N = 30). Hierarchical multiple regression revealed that younger adults performed better than older adults (P < 0.01) and the age effect was quadratic (age2). It also showed Age X Education and Age X L2 Speaking interactions predicted naming performance. The Age X Education interaction indicated that the advantages of greater education increased with advancing age. Since education is in the second language (L2) in our population, this finding is no doubt linked to the Age X L2 Speaking interaction. This suggests that L2 speaking proficiency contributed more to first language (L1) naming with advancing age.
Highlights
Performance on confrontation naming tests, in which individuals have to identify a visual stimulus representing an object or an action and correctly label the stimulus aloud, has been linked to age, education, and bilingualism
The analysis revealed a high alpha coefficient (Cronbach’s α = 0.895) indicating that items on the Kashmiri Naming Test (KNT) are internally consistent
We investigated whether lexical frequency affects KNT scores and if they are modulated by age, education, L2 speaking, L2 reading and L2 writing measures
Summary
Performance on confrontation naming tests, in which individuals have to identify a visual stimulus representing an object or an action and correctly label the stimulus aloud, has been linked to age, education, and bilingualism. Difficulties with confrontation naming can generally be attributed to problems with the lexeme retrieval stage and such difficulties are mostly age related in non-brain-damaged individuals [3, 4]. The majority of studies investigating confrontation naming in older adults have found that they perform significantly worse than younger adults (e.g., [5,6,7,8,9]) with decline in confrontation naming more pronounced after the age of 70 (see [10]). Several studies have not found age related differences in performance between older and younger adults (e.g., [11, 12]). Though the majority of studies suggest age may have an effect on performance in confrontation naming tests, there are likely other variables that can account for performance differences
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