Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T10:34:50.254Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Adult age differences in judgments of semantic fit

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2004

DEBORAH M. LITTLE ,
KRISTEN J. PRENTICE  and
ARTHUR WINGFIELD
DEBORAH M. LITTLE
Affiliation:
Brandeis University
KRISTEN J. PRENTICE
Affiliation:
Brandeis University
ARTHUR WINGFIELD
Affiliation:
Brandeis University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

A total of 130 young adults and 173 older adults gave goodness of fit ratings for sets of word alternatives for 123 English sentence frames. Word alternatives were semantically plausible in all cases but varied in the likelihood of their occurrence within the sentence frames. Adding support to the general belief that vocabulary and language knowledge are well preserved in normal aging, our results showed generally high agreement in goodness of fit ratings by the young and older adults. Differences that did occur appeared to be due to cohort differences in word usage and interests rather than underlying cognitive function. We suggest that this similarity in semantic judgments may help to explain why adult age differences in comprehension and memory for sentences are generally smaller than age differences for other examples of episodic memory.

Type
Research Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , March 2004 , pp. 135 - 143
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Battig W. F., & Montague W. E. 1969. Category norms for verbal items in 56 categories: A replication and extension of the Connecticut category norms. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 80, 1 46.Google Scholar
Bowles N. L. 1993. Semantic processes that serve picture naming. In J. Cerella, J. Rybash, W. Hoyer, & M. L. Commons (Eds.), Adult information processing: Limits on loss (pp. 303 326). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Bowles N. L., Obler L. K., & Poon L. W. 1989. Aging and word retrieval: Naturalistic, clinical, and laboratory data. In L. W. Poon, D. C. Rubin, & B. A. Wilson (Eds.), Everyday cognition in adulthood and late life (pp. 244 264). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bowles N. L., & Poon L. W. 1985. Aging and retrieval of words in semantic memory. Journal of Gerontology, 40, 71 77.Google Scholar
Bowles N. L., Williams D., & Poon L. W. 1983. On the use of word association norms in aging research. Experimental Aging Research, 9, 175 177.Google Scholar
Brown A. S., & Mitchell D. B. 1991. Age differences in retrieval consistency and response dominance. Journal of Gerontology, 46, 332 339.Google Scholar
Burke D., MacKay D., Worthley J., & Wade E. 1991. On the tip of the tongue: What causes word finding failures in young and older adults? Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 542 579.Google Scholar
Burke D. M., & Peters L. 1986. Word associations in old age: Evidence for consistency in semantic encoding during adulthood. Psychology and Aging, 1, 283 291.Google Scholar
Caplan D., & Waters G. S. 1999. Verbal working memory and sentence comprehension. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 77 126.Google Scholar
Howard D. V. 1980. Category norms: A comparison of the Battig and Montague (1969) norms with the responses of adults between the ages of 20 and 80. Journal of Gerontology, 35, 225 231.Google Scholar
Kahana M. J., Howard M., Zaromb F., & Wingfield A. 2002. Age dissociates recency and lag-recency effects in free recall. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, 28, 530 540.Google Scholar
Kahana M. J., & Wingfield A. 2000. A functional relation between learning and organization in free recall. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 7, 516 521.Google Scholar
Kausler D. M. 1994. Learning and memory in normal aging. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Kemper S. 1986. Imitation of complex syntactic constructions by elderly adults. Applied Psycholinguistics, 7, 277 288.Google Scholar
Light L. L. 1991. Memory and aging: Four hypotheses in search of data. Annual Review of Psychology, 42, 333 376.Google Scholar
Lovelace E. A., & Cooley S. 1982. Free associations of older adults to single words and conceptually related word triads. Journal of Gerontology, 37, 432 437.Google Scholar
Nicholas M., Barth C., Obler L. K., Au R., & Albert M. L. 1997. Naming in normal aging and dementia of the Alzheimer's type. In H. Goodglass & A. Wingfield (Eds.), Anomia: Neuroanatomical and cognitive correlates (pp. 166 188). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Norman S., Kemper S., Kynette D., Cheung H. T., & Anagnopoulos C. 1991. Syntactic complexity and adults' running memory span. Journal of Gerontology, 46, 346 351.Google Scholar
Nusbaum H. C., Pisoni D. B., & Davis C. K. 1984. Sizing up the Hoosier Mental Lexicon: Measuring the familiarity of 20,000 words (Research on Spoken Language Processing Progress Report 10, pp. 357 376). Bloomington, IN: Speech Research Laboratory.
Perlmutter M. 1979. Age differences in the consistency of adults' associative responses. Experimental Aging Research, 5, 549 553.Google Scholar
Potter M. C. 1990. Regeneration in the short-term recall of sentences. Journal of Memory & Language, 29, 633 654.Google Scholar
Riegal K. F., & Birren J. E. 1966. Age differences in verbal associations. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 106, 153 170.Google Scholar
Tresselt M. E., & Mayzner M. S. 1964. The Kent Rosanoff word association: Word association norms as a function of age. Psychonomic Science, 1, 65 66.Google Scholar
Uyeda K. M., & Mandler G. 1980. Prototypicality norms for 28 semantic categories. Research Methods & Instrumentation, 12, 587 595.Google Scholar
Wingfield A., & Kahana M. J. 2002. The dynamics of memory retrieval in older adulthood. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 56, 187 199.Google Scholar
Wingfield A., Lindfield K. C., & Kahana M. J. 1998. Adult age differences in the temporal characteristics of category free recall. Psychology and Aging, 13, 256 266.Google Scholar
Wingfield A., Peelle J. E., & Grossman M. (in press). Speech rate and syntactic complexity as multiplicative factors in speech comprehension by young and older adults. Journal of Aging, Neuropsychology, & Cognition.
Wingfield A., & Stine–Morrow E. A. L. 2000. Language and speech. In F. I. M. Craik & T. A. Salthouse (Eds.), Handbook of aging and cognition (2nd ed., pp. 359 416). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Wingfield A., Tun P. A., & Rosen M. J. 1995. Age differences in veridical and reconstructive recall of syntactically and randomly segmented speech. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 50B, P257 P266.Google Scholar