ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Lang. Sci.
Sec. Language Processing
This article is part of the Research TopicEmbodiment in Cognition, Language, and CommunicationView all 6 articles
The Effect of Aging on the Semantic Processing of Overt and Covert Chinese Face Action Verbs
Provisionally accepted
Meng Jiang
Ya Tan*- Sichuan International Studies University, Chongqing, China
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The resilience of language, particularly lexicosemantic processing, to age-related cognitive decline remains a subject of debate. This study investigated this issue by examining how healthy aging affects the processing of Chinese facial action verbs distinguished by effector explicitness—overt verbs (e.g., "睁眼" [open one's eyes]) versus covert verbs (e.g., "观星" [gaze at the stars]). In a semantic categorization task, older adults exhibited significantly slower response times than younger adults overall, indicating a generalized age-related slowing in semantic access. While a numerical trend suggested that older adults might benefit more from the explicit cues in overt verbs, the critical Age Group × Verb Type interaction was not statistically significant. Thus, the efficiency advantage conferred by explicit effector representation remained stable across age. These findings confirm that semantic processing is not immune to the general slowing observed in aging, yet the fundamental architecture of semantic representation—specifically, the relative ease of processing lexically specified effectors—appears to be preserved.
Keywords: Aging, Covert face action verbs, Lexicosemantic aging, Overt face action verbs, Semantic Processing
Received: 23 Dec 2025; Accepted: 30 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Jiang and Tan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ya Tan
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