Name agreement and naming latencies for typed picture naming in aging adults

This baseline study aimed to create a coherent set of images that can be used to describe language decline found in healthy elderly and to compare this to the language change found in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. To this extend, a typed picture naming task was created, in which visual complexity, age-of-acquisition, frequency and name agreement were controlled for. 76 healthy elderly participated in the test; their data will be used in follow-up studies to compare with cognitively impaired patients. The entire typing process was logged with keystroke logging tools Inputlog and Scriptlog; the obtained results were analysed in light of the typing product (name agreement and object recognition) and the writing process (naming latencies and interkey latencies). Results showed that the latencies increased with age and that the older participants had longer latencies for images with a lower frequency and higher age-of-acquisition. Hence, our results indicate the need to take both the latencies and the typing product into consideration.