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Open Access Thesis

Keywords

Aging--Physiological aspects; Aging--Psychological aspects; Cognition in old age; Academic theses;

Abstract

The current study investigated the differences on cognition tests and whether or not an age effect existed between young versus middle-aged adults. Twenty young adults (ages 20-39) and twenty middle-aged adults (40-59) were given four cognitive tests to determine if differences in performance existed across the age groups. Tests included the Ross Information Processing Assessment-2nd revision (RIPA-2; Ross-Swain, 1996), the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RA VLT; Rey, 1964 ), the Wechsler Working Memory (WWM) subtests of the Wechsler Memory Scale, 3rd edition (WMS-Ill; Wechsler, 1997), and the Cognitive Linguistic Quick Test (CLQT,· Helm-Estabrooks, 2001 ). A series of one-factor analyses of variance (ANOV A) revealed statistically significant differences between the two age groups on the Visual Reproduction, Span Forward, Span Reverse, and Span Forward Reverse on the WWM, Immediate Memory and Temporal Orientation subtests of the RIPA-2, Symbol Trails and Maze subtests of the CLQT, Attention and Visuospatial domains of the CLQT, and Trial V of the RA VLT. No statistically significant differences occurred between young and middle-aged adults on the remaining RIP A-2, WMS-III subtests, other domains on the CLQT, or trials of the RA VLT. Implications of these cognitive-linguistic findings may in fact be related to age; a comparison of attention, visuospatial skills, and memory with relation to middle-aged adults will be discussed

Year of Submission

2009

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Department of Communicative Disorders

First Advisor

Angela N. Burda

Second Advisor

Todd A. Bohnenkamp

Third Advisor

Kristin Mack

Comments

If you are the rightful copyright holder of this thesis and wish to have it removed from the Open Access Collection, please submit a request to scholarworks@uni.edu and include clear identification of the work, preferably with URL.

Date Original

2009

Object Description

1 PDF file (82 leaves)

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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