P-12 What is Normal? Normative Data for Healthy Older Adults Learning New Verbal Material

Buller Hall

The poster presents the normative data that was collected on a group of healthy older adults as they participated in a novel verbal learning task. For persons with aphasia (a language disorder resulting from brain injury), one of the challenges of speech therapy is facilitating generalization—from individual and group treatments to everyday situations and functional communicative interactions. In order to do this more effectively, therapists need to know more about what normal healthy adults do in situations similar to group and individual therapy treatments. What does normal look like? Preliminary norms have been collected on novel verbal learning. Difficulty learning is likely not all due to stroke, there is a range of learning for healthy adults. Learning improvement was found to be statistically significant. Younger individuals showed better improvement on the learning task than older individuals.