, 2003; Aine et al.,2006). The congruence between available resources and maintaining the level of performance can be considered as the optimal use of limited resources in alternative ways (recruiting different brain areas). In accordance with the compensation hypothesis, preservation of receptive language abilities in aging has been confirmed by different studies (Wingfield & Grossman, 2006; Tyler et al., 2010). However, evidence of age-related neurofunctional changes sustaining expressive

word retrieval abilities remain scarce. One specific aim of this study was to describe selleck screening library the age-related changes in the neurofunctional patterns of activation for some of the basic and strategic processes in VF. With regards to expressive language abilities in aging, only a few neuroimaging studies have investigated semantic and orthographic Akt inhibitor and phonemic processing of words at the spoken level. This can be performed within the framework of a VF task requiring participants to generate as many words as possible under specific search conditions (e.g. animals’

names) and a limited amount of time. Using fMRI and a response pacing paradigm, Meinzer et al. (2009, 2012a) reported similar performances for the total number of words correctly produced and left-lateralized patterns of cerebral activations (e.g. inferior frontal gyri) between younger and older adults during the phonemic condition, while a significant age-related drop in semantic performances was accompanied by additional right-hemisphere activations. Moreover, Meinzer et al. (2012a,2012b) showed that bilateral activity in the ventral inferior frontal gyri was crucially mediated by task difficulty rather than solely by age. However, the VF task involves a number of cognitive components and the simple assessment of the total number of words produced is unlikely to fully describe their interactions with age. Considering that word retrieval becomes more effortful in time within a category, this task can be used to explore the temporal progression of the processes involved by analysing performances

at different period (e.g. Ureohydrolase Crowe, 1998). In addition, Troyer et al. (1997) proposed assessing clustering and switching components of fluency performances, which respectively correspond to the number of words produced within semantic or phonemic subcategories (or clusters) and the ability to shift between these subcategories. However, to the best of our knowledge, the age-related changes in the brain activation for strategic processes have never been explored. Age-related differences in patterns of brain activity during different production times (0–30 s, 31–60 s and 61–90 s) and retrieval processes (clustering and switching) were looked at using a self-paced overt semantic and orthographic VF task (Marsolais et al.