The authors use network analysis to track structural shifts from early adulthood into late life. In the dominant language, the map becomes more globally connected through mid-adulthood and then shows signs of reorganization in later years, with stronger pockets of related words. The second language follows a similar arc early on but undergoes larger changes and remains less cohesive overall. Those patterns hint at how experience, use, and cognitive aging shape the resilience of the languages people carry.
Understanding these trajectories matters for education, workplace communication, and how society supports healthy aging among bilinguals. The study raises questions about strategies that might preserve or strengthen lexical links in a nondominant language and how compensatory processes help older adults stay communicative. Follow the link to explore what the network details reveal about learning, memory, and inclusive approaches to language across the lifespan.
ABSTRACT
The present study examines the bilingual aging lexicon by comparing word association networks across four age groups of Chinese–English bilingual adults. Adopting network analysis with breadth-first search-based sampling, results showed that in L1 (Chinese) networks, global connectivity increases from early to mid-adulthood, accompanied by reduced local clustering and enhanced global efficiency; the network remains relatively stable through midlife, followed by declining efficiency and progressively pronounced modular structure in late adulthood. The L2 (English) networks mirror L1 developmental trends in early and mid-adulthood but with substantially larger shifts; throughout adulthood, L2 exhibits lower global and local connectivity and weaker modularity compared to L1. These findings reveal distinct developmental trajectories for L1 and L2 semantic networks in bilinguals, underscoring greater structural stability in the dominant language (L1) across adulthood relative to the nondominant language (L2). This L1–L2 asymmetry points to differential impacts of aging on bilingual lexical organization. Results are discussed in relation to compensatory mechanisms and enrichment accounts of cognitive aging.
