Check out this recent paper published by SLEIC researchers Sara Troutman and Dr. Michele Diaz. This paper looks at the relationship between white matter in the brain and age-related phonological deficits. Using a Picture-Word Interference (PWI) task with 18 younger and 19 older healthy adults, they found that, across ages, better picture naming in the presence of phonological distractors was associated with lower RD across dorsal, ventral, and fronto-striatal tracts, and higher FA along dorsal tracts. The pattern of lower RD and higher FA, which is thought to reflect better white matter structure, points to the dorsal stream tracts as critical for performance on the PWI task. Moreover, the effects of RD and FA on performance were attenuated by the effect of age, reflecting the shared variance between age and white matter as it relates to language production ability. Read more here.