• Posted August 27, 2026

This Brain Skill Doesn't Decline With Age, And Can Actually Improve Among Seniors

Age doesn’t seem to degrade a person’s language skills as it does other brain functions, a new study says.

Unless a senior is affected by stroke or dementia, they are likely to retain and might even improve their ability with language, researchers reported Aug. 24 in the journal Nature Communications.

In fact, scans show that activity in the brain’s language processing network is nearly identical among seniors to that found in younger adults, researchers said.

“In the language network, we couldn’t find any differences between older and younger groups,” lead researcher Anne Billot, a postdoctoral scholar at Harvard University, said in a news release. "In contrast, the executive system showed decline across almost all of the measures." 

The executive system in the brain powers skills like decision-making and organization, researchers said.

These results indicate that parts of the brain dedicated to unique functions like language might be less prone to age-related decline than general-purpose networks that contribute to many different skills, researchers said.

“It’s well known that executive functions, such as attention, working memory and cognitive control, tend to decline with age. And it’s also known that in opposition to that, language skills typically tend to remain quite stable or even improve with age,” Billot said. “These two types of functions really go in opposite directions in healthy aging.”

For the new study, researchers used brain scans to compare 64 older adults ages 41 to 80 to 483 younger adults between 17 and 39.

The team examined the function of the brain’s language-selective network versus its multiple-demand network, which includes several different regions and is tied to executive function.

During a spatial memory test, during which people had to remember the location of squares in a grid, the multiple-demand network showed weaker activity in older adults, researchers found. Their networks were smaller and less well-synchronized than those in younger adults.

But when participants listened to stories and read sentences, brain activity was about the same regardless of age. For example, younger and older subjects showed similar brain responses to an unfamiliar word or unusual sentence structure.

“We have previously used similar kinds of materials to show that young adults show strong sensitivity to these points of linguistic difficulty: activity in the language areas goes up,” senior researcher Evelina Fedorenko, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, said in a news release. "Here we found that in older adults, you also see this sensitivity, which suggests that there’s nothing fundamentally different about how they process language."

Other studies have shown that language skills don’t decline with age, and in some people language processing even improves as they grow older, researchers said.

This might be because vocabulary and reading skill can continually grow over time, they said.

“Vocabulary keeps increasing as long as people have been measuring, which makes sense. People get exposed to more and more language, and older people sometimes start reading more, so they get an extra boost — it’s like a large language model trained on increasingly more data,” Fedorenko said.

By comparison, “the multiple demand network is a different system in the sense that it’s not accumulating knowledge over time,” she said. “It’s more like a flexible resource that you can deploy in all sorts of ways. And somehow that’s the thing that is more vulnerable to aging.

“Why it’s so vulnerable — that is a very good question,” Fedorenko concluded.

More information

The American Brain Foundation has more on brain aging.

SOURCES: MIT, news release, Aug. 24, 2026; Nature Communications, Aug. 24, 2026