ABSTRACT
The concept of aging assumes that there is something that a group of people have in common. One of the findings in research on language and aging is that elderly people have larger vocabularies than younger adults, due to their long existence as a language user and learner. Aging is typically associated with improved vocabulary during adulthood to very old age, but there is a need to control for education. There are few studies on multilingualism and aging. The most widely accepted explanation for an increase in tip-of-the-tongue with aging is that the connections between elements in the lexicon decreases in strength. Since the findings on the benefits of multilingualism in aging were published, many research groups have done work on various aspects of executive functions, multilingualism, and aging. From a research perspective, age is just an index variable without any explanatory power.
