Xiao Yang, Dong Yanping
Language Processing and Development Lab, School of International Studies, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China.
Behav Sci (Basel). 2025 Mar 10;15(3):336. doi: 10.3390/bs15030336.
Lexical retrieval difficulty is a common daily complaint among older adults. Recent evidence suggests that older adults name motor-related nouns (e.g., knife) more accurately than non-motor nouns (e.g., steak). However, it remains unclear whether this motor-relatedness effect can reduce older adults' object naming latency (a potentially more sensitive measure of word retrieval than accuracy) and how it may be modulated by individual differences (e.g., age and global cognition). Therefore, we recruited a large number of older adults to complete a Chinese version of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) and a timed picture-naming task, and we explored the two remaining issues with data from 76 community-dwelling older adults (65-81 years old), excluding participants with possible AD. Linear mixed-effects analysis revealed a main effect of motor-relatedness on naming latency in older adults and a significant interaction with the MoCA score after controlling for a number of stimulus-related factors (i.e., age of acquisition, familiarity, name agreement, and visual complexity) and participant-related factors (i.e., gender and education) as covariates, but age showed neither a main effect nor a significant interaction with motor-relatedness. Further simple slope analysis showed that older adults were faster at naming objects with high motor-relatedness and that older adults with low MoCA scores benefited more from the motor-relatedness effect. These findings suggest that motor-relatedness may compensate for the normal course of cognitive ageing in older adults. Implications for the motor-relatedness effect were discussed.
词汇检索困难是老年人日常常见的抱怨。最近的证据表明，老年人对与运动相关的名词（如刀）的命名比非运动名词（如牛排）更准确。然而，尚不清楚这种与运动相关性的效应是否能减少老年人的物体命名潜伏期（一种比准确性更能敏感衡量词汇检索的指标），以及它如何受到个体差异（如年龄和整体认知）的调节。因此，我们招募了大量老年人完成中文版蒙特利尔认知评估（MoCA）和一项限时图片命名任务，并利用76名社区居住的老年人（65 - 81岁）的数据探讨了剩下的两个问题，排除了可能患有阿尔茨海默病的参与者。线性混合效应分析显示，在控制了一些与刺激相关的因素（即习得年龄、熟悉度、名称一致性和视觉复杂性）以及与参与者相关的因素（即性别和教育程度）作为协变量后，与运动相关性对老年人命名潜伏期有主效应，且与MoCA分数有显著交互作用，但年龄对与运动相关性既无主效应也无显著交互作用。进一步的简单斜率分析表明，老年人对与运动高度相关的物体命名更快，且MoCA分数低的老年人从与运动相关性效应中获益更多。这些发现表明，与运动相关性可能补偿老年人认知衰老的正常进程。文中讨论了与运动相关性效应的意义。
