This and that morning: Age predicts demonstrative choice according to specific semantic factors

Besides the physical changes, aging also involves significant transformations in social roles, relationships, personality, sexuality, and body image. As these life experience transitions might be reflected in language use, this study examines whether aging influences demonstrative choice across various aging-relevant semantic dimensions. To this end, we employ the Demonstrative Choice Task (DCT) which requires participants to select either a proximal (“this”) or distal (“that”) demonstrative when presented with words devoid of spatial context. The DCT has been previously suggested to have the potential to capture psychological traits and experiential states.<br/>Two online DCT experiments were analyzed. Both involved English-speaking participants presented with different subsets of words drawn from a word bank with normed semantic features. In Experiment A, 220 younger (18-30 years) and 67 older (50+ years) participants each responded to 180 words. In Experiment B, 1,230 younger and 394 older participants each responded to 60 words.<br/>Linear regression models were used to assess the influence of age on demonstrative choice, with average demonstrative use, weighted by semantic factor scores, as the outcome variable. Results showed that older participants modulated their demonstrative choices differently from younger participants depending on the degree to which words were pleasant, had manual affordances, and were bodily or conceptually related to the self. The strong correlation between findings from both experiments suggests robust replicability.<br/>These results indicate that the DCT can reflect age-related experiential changes, potentially by eliciting the use of an imagined space structured by semantic dimensions around a conceptualized self.<br/>