How do our brains navigate the complexity of abstract and concrete words as we age? How might an understanding of these mechanisms unlock clinical insights for managing aphasia? The concreteness effect is a well-documented phenomenon in which concrete words are processed more easily and efficiently than abstract words. In this talk, Anna will first review how recent research has been informed by theories of the concreteness effect and what studies have revealed about the effect of aging on the concreteness effect. Mixed findings point to the importance of considering the different cognitive dimensions of abstract words and an understanding of how the concreteness effect may play out differently in measures of receptive and expressive language. She will then present some recent work from our lab investigating differences in the nature and strength of the concreteness effect between people with aphasia and neurologically intact older adults. We find that people with aphasia have higher concreteness effects compared to a neurologically intact comparison group, and that concreteness effects were higher in expressive language measures than in receptive language measures. In addition, higher receptive concreteness effects in people with aphasia were associated with more severe aphasia. Together, these findings add to our understanding of lexical-semantic processing in aging and aphasia and have important clinical implications for the development of aphasia rehabilitation approaches targeting word retrieval.