Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Patterns of language use change over time and may reflect and/or impact lexico-semantic representations of individuals as they age. In the current study, we use distributional semantic word embeddings trained on corpora from different decades (HistWords) to examine language change. We first measured lexico-semantic organization in different age groups, using an open dataset of association norms, and tested how they may be related to language change. Then, using the diachronic word embeddings, we sampled English words that have changed in meaning and words that have maintained the same meaning/usage patterns between the 1950s and the 1990s. We tested how relatedness judgments for those words differ when paired with their “neighbors” from earlier vs. recent decades, for both younger and older adults. Our findings suggest that individuals continuously and rapidly update their lexico-semantic representations across the lifespan, such that earlier learned meanings have minimal impact on present-day representation.