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The Relationship Between Linguistic Mazes and Executive Function in African American Adults
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Thesis/Dissertation
Date
2025-08
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Communication Sciences
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https://doi.org/10.34944/v8x5-5j47
Abstract
People tend to become more disfluent or show a change in their disfluency patterns with age, producing less informative utterances across contexts (e.g., Samani et al., 2017; Andrade & Martins-Reis, 2010). The specific pattern and mechanism behind this phenomenon are still unsettled (for a review, see Mortensen et al., 2006). Fleming (2014) reported that declining executive function abilities in the context of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) were associated with a greater number of linguistic content mazes. Confirming this finding in diverse populations would further establish that subtle language changes can be indicative of executive dysfunction and an increased risk of developing MCI or dementia. African Americans are at an elevated risk for abnormal cognitive decline due to complex risk factors, yet cognitive-linguistic screeners are often less specific for this population due to their cultural and educational biases (Norman et al., 2011; Wooten et al., 2023). This thesis expands on previous research by exploring the relationship between executive function, naming, and fluent language production using a word definition task in a cohort study of community-dwelling African Americans. To explore if these variables predict the use of linguistic mazes, the prevalence of linguistic mazes across utterances (pmaze) was calculated and compared to performance on a battery of neuropsychological measures of cognition and language. No significant correlations were found between the neuropsychological measures and pmaze, indicating that pmaze may not be caused by executive dysfunction alone. This thesis concludes with a discussion of variables beyond executive dysfunction that may influence linguistic mazes and the theoretical and clinical implications of these findings.
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