Previous studies showed that high Cognitive Reserve (CR, years of education and experience and knowledge acquired in life) is correlated with language proficiency as measured with vocabulary size, verbal analogy and semantic processing. The aim of the present study is to investigate the relationship between CR and the ability in retrieving different categories of words: Proper Names, Logo Names and Common Nouns. The hypothesis is that CR contributes more in retrieving Common Nouns and Logo Names which are highly semantically interconnected, than Proper Names which are pure referring expressions. Forty-six Italian healthy older adults underwent the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) and their performances spanned from low to high global cognitive profile. They were also administered a picture naming task for Proper Names, Logo Names and Common Nouns. Latency and Accuracy were recorded. CR was measured with the Cognitive Reserve Index (CRI) questionnaire which includes education, working time activities, and leisure time activities. Participants were significantly faster and more accurate in name retrieval when CR was high. CRI and MoCA as interaction terms predicted naming Latency with a stronger effect of CRI when the global cognitive profile was in the low range. The effect of CRI on Accuracy was lower for Proper Names than for Common Nouns and Logo Names, which did not differ from each other. Our results show that name retrieval Accuracy can be predicted by CR, significantly more in the case of Logo Names and Common Nouns than in the case of Proper Names. As Proper Names have scarce semantic interconnections and are arbitrarily assigned to unique individuals, they are not much influenced by CR. Although Logo Names are also arbitrarily assigned to their bearers, they can be conceptually categorized and thus influenced by CR. The weak relationship between Proper Names and CR might suggest a proper name task as a useful tool to detect early signs of dementia, in particular for persons with high CR.
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