{"id":34471,"date":"2026-08-25T12:25:19","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T16:25:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/?p=34471"},"modified":"2026-08-24T17:04:59","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T21:04:59","slug":"language-skills-stay-strong-in-older-adults-even-while-other-cognitive-abilities-decline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/2026\/08\/language-skills-stay-strong-in-older-adults-even-while-other-cognitive-abilities-decline\/","title":{"rendered":"Language skills stay strong in older adults, even while other cognitive abilities decline"},"content":{"rendered":"

CAMBRIDGE, MA — As people age, many cognitive functions tend to decline. Brain scanning studies have revealed corresponding changes in the function of a brain network that is involved in many of these cognitive functions<\/strong>, including working memory and problem-solving.<\/p>\n

When it comes to language skills, however, the picture is different. Unless impaired by a stroke or dementia, most older people retain their language skills and may even improve them as they steadily gain vocabulary throughout their lives.<\/p>\n

A new brain imaging study from an MIT-Boston University collaboration now reveals the neural activity underlying this observation. The researchers found that in older adults, activity of the language processing network is nearly identical to that seen in the brains of younger adults during language tasks.<\/p>\n

In contrast, the researchers found that activation patterns in the multiple demand network, a brain system involved in executive control tasks such as decision-making, were very different in older and younger adults.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the language network, we couldn\u2019t find any differences between older and younger groups. In contrast, the executive system showed decline<\/strong> across almost all of the measures. The network synchronization declined in older adults, the extent of activation was reduced, and the magnitude of activation was reduced as well,\u201d says Anne Billot, one of the lead authors of the new study, who carried out this work while doing her PhD at BU and is now a postdoc at Harvard University.<\/p>\n

The findings suggest that parts of the brain t<\/strong>hat are specialized for specific functions, such as language processing, may be more resilient to aging than the multiple demand network, a more general-purpose network that has greater flexibility in its function, the researchers say.<\/p>\n

Former MIT research assistant Niharika Jhingan is also a lead author of the study, which appears today in Nature Communications<\/em>. Evelina Fedorenko, an MIT associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences and member of MIT\u2019s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and Swathi Kiran, the James and Cecilia Tse Ying Professor in Neurorehabilitation at BU, are the paper\u2019s senior co-authors.<\/p>\n

The resilience of language<\/strong><\/p>\n

To study the effects of aging on the brain, the researchers looked at two groups of people, ages 17-39 and 41-80. Based on previous studies, they expected that the multiple demand network, which includes several regions in the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain, would look different in the brains of older people.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s well known that executive functions, such as attention, working memory, and cognitive control, tend to decline with age. And it\u2019s also known that in opposition to that, language skills typically tend to remain quite stable or even improve with age,\u201d Billot says. \u201cThese two types of functions really go in opposite directions in healthy aging. In terms of behavior, that\u2019s quite well-established, and we wanted to see if that was also the case in the brain.\u201d<\/p>\n

In previous studies of the multiple demand network, scientists have found that as people age network activity becomes less synchronized. Some neuroscientists have hypothesized that this may also happen in the language network, but studies haven\u2019t found definitive evidence for this.<\/p>\n

The MIT researchers were able to look at both networks by designing tasks that elicit responses primarily in either the language network or the multiple demand network. This allowed them to identify, for each participant, the brain areas that belong to each network.<\/p>\n

During a spatial memory task \u2014 remembering the location of squares in a grid \u2014 the researchers confirmed that the multiple demand network showed altered activity in older adults. Compared to the younger subjects, their networks were smaller and less well-synchronized, and the overall activation level was weaker.<\/p>\n

To identify the language network, the researchers had participants listen to stories and read sentences. They found that in both groups, brain activity in response to language showed similar levels and spatial distribution across the network.<\/p>\n

They also found that younger and older subjects showed similar brain responses when they encountered an unfamiliar word or an unusual grammatical construction.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have previously used similar kinds of materials to show that young adults show strong sensitivity to these points of linguistic difficulty: activity in the language areas goes up. Here we found that in older adults, you also see this sensitivity, which suggests that there\u2019s nothing fundamentally different about how they process language,\u201d Fedorenko says.<\/p>\n

A language boost<\/strong><\/p>\n

The researchers also showed that in older people, the language network did not show any signs of becoming less synchronized. Additionally, the network did not show signs that it was blurring together with the multiple demand network, as some neuroscientists have hypothesized might happen.<\/p>\n

While this study did not evaluate language ability, other studies have shown that not only do language skills not decline with age, for some people, their language processing improves<\/strong> in older age. This might be because vocabulary and reading skill can continually grow over time, the researchers say.<\/p>\n

\u201cVocabulary keeps increasing as long as people have been measuring, which makes sense. People get exposed to more and more language, and older people sometimes start reading more, so they get an extra boost \u2014 it\u2019s like a large language model trained on increasingly more data,\u201d Fedorenko says.<\/p>\n

Given these findings, one possible generalization is that parts of the brain that are specialized for particular functions such as language may be less susceptible to age-related decline than the multiple demand network. That network is unique in its ability to give the human brain the flexibility to learn new skills and adapt to new situations.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe multiple demand network is a different system in the sense that it\u2019s not accumulating knowledge over time. It\u2019s more like a flexible resource that you can deploy in all sorts of ways. And somehow that\u2019s the thing that is more vulnerable to aging,\u201d Fedorenko says. \u201cWhy it\u2019s so vulnerable \u2014 that is a very good question.\u201d<\/p>\n

###<\/p>\n

The research was funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, as well as MIT\u2019s McGovern Institute, Simons Center for the Social Brain, Poitras Center for Psychiatric Disorders Research, and Quest for Intelligence.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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JOURNAL<\/h4>\n

Nature Communications<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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