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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jan 13, 2026

The Spatial Memory Game: Testing the Relationship Between Spatial Language, Object Knowledge, and Spatial Cognition

The Spatial Memory Game: Testing the Relationship Between Spatial Language, Object Knowledge, and Spatial Cognition

Published on: February 19, 2018

Semantic Representations Are Updated Across the Lifespan Reflecting Diachronic Language Change.

Ellis Cain¹, Rachel Ryskin¹

¹Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced, Merced, CA, USA.

Open Mind : Discoveries in Cognitive Science

|January 7, 2026

Summary

Individuals continuously update word meanings throughout their lives, regardless of age. Semantic spaces reflect current language use, not historical meanings, suggesting rapid lexico-semantic representation updates.

Keywords:

aging language change learning lexical semantics

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Last Updated: Jan 13, 2026

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Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation tDCS of Wernicke's and Broca's Areas in Studies of Language Learning and Word Acquisition

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Published on: July 13, 2019

Measuring Statistical Learning Across Modalities and Domains in School-Aged Children Via an Online Platform and Neuroimaging Techniques

Measuring Statistical Learning Across Modalities and Domains in School-Aged Children Via an Online Platform and Neuroimaging Techniques

Published on: June 30, 2020

Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Computational Linguistics
Psycholinguistics

Background:

Human semantic memory is shaped by language context.
Language use and word meanings evolve over time.
Individual semantic spaces may retain historical language traces or update dynamically.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if individual semantic spaces align with historical language changes or current usage.
To determine if age influences the retention of historical word meanings.
To examine the rate and nature of semantic space updates across the lifespan.

Main Methods:

Utilized diachronic word embeddings (HistWords) to model language meaning change.
Compared semantic spaces of different age cohorts with historical and contemporary corpora.
Collected word relatedness judgments from younger and older adults for words with changing meanings.

Main Results:

Both younger and older adults' semantic spaces strongly correlated with recent language corpora.
Little evidence suggests older adults retain historical semantic spaces more than younger adults.
Individual semantic representations are rapidly updated, largely replacing older meanings with newer ones.

Conclusions:

Lexico-semantic representations are continuously updated throughout life, irrespective of age.
Recent language experience predominantly shapes current word meanings.
Earlier learned word meanings are largely superseded by contemporary language usage patterns.