Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Accumulating knowledge and experience across the lifespan are bound to have an impact on the meaning of words. Here, we investigated this idea using primarily emotional valence of words as a test-case. We used French databases that gather psycholinguistic variables including emotional valence of words, in four groups of individuals including young (18-25; 26-39 years), middle-aged (40-59 years) and older (>60 years) adults. Following the hypothesis that words may display age-related differences in their psycholinguistic properties, we computed linear regressions over all individual words as a function of age-groups. Results revealed notably that between 5 and 10% of words show significant linear changes of emotional valence as a function of age. This pattern highlights the situated and flexible nature of word meanings and suggests that self-relevance of experience affects semantic memory.