Schedule of Events | Symposia

The Impact of Loneliness on Language Processing in Healthy Older Adults: Insights from Event-Related Potentials

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Hsu-Wen Huang¹ (hwhuang@nhri.edu.tw), Chih-Mao Huang²; ¹National Health Reserch Institutes, Taiwan, ²National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan

Loneliness, characterized by a distressing emotional reaction to perceived inadequacies in social connections, has significantly risen in prevalence since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. While prior studies have associated loneliness in older adults with emotional disorders and cognitive decline, its influence on language comprehension—a vital component of social interaction—remains largely unexplored. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating how loneliness affects semantic retrieval in healthy older adults. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we analyzed participants' neural activity as they evaluated category membership under three conditions: high typicality, low typicality, and category violations. Results revealed a negative correlation between loneliness and N400 amplitude reductions for low-typicality items relative to category violations. Furthermore, participants experiencing higher levels of loneliness displayed weakened and delayed N400 responses within narrower timeframes compared to less lonely individuals. These findings suggest that loneliness disrupts semantic memory retrieval in older adults, potentially impairing language comprehension and intensifying social isolation. This study underscores the adverse effects of loneliness on linguistic processes, which may contribute to a reinforcing cycle of increasing isolation and worsening loneliness.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Development & aging