Morrow Lorna I, Duffy M Frances
Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow, 58 Hillhead St., Glasgow, G12 8QB Scotland.
Behav Res Methods. 2005 Nov;37(4):608-25. doi: 10.3758/bf03192731.
Attributes associated with concept representations, such as familiarity, typicality, and age of acquisition, have been shown to be important influences on lexical-semantic processing. In most previous studies of healthy and pathological aging, these attributes are not equated for younger and older adults separately on the stimuli used. In this study, normative data were collected to test whether there exist any age differences in these attributes. The results demonstrate that the ratings given by younger and older adults on natural and manmade category items correlated positively. However, age differences were also apparent, whereby older adults provided higher ratings overall than younger adults. Suggestions and hypotheses are presented to explain this pattern of age differences, which relate to how category concepts may be represented by healthy younger and older adults. Also, the possible implications for these differential age ratings on lexical-semantic processing are discussed. The age differences apparent in this study demonstrate the need to consider age-appropriate normative ratings in the selection of stimuli for use in lexical-semantic processing studies of aging, and the normative data presented provide a means of equating category stimuli. The complete list of all the means is available at www.psychonomic.org/archive.
与概念表征相关的属性，如熟悉度、典型性和习得年龄，已被证明对词汇语义加工有重要影响。在以往大多数关于健康衰老和病理性衰老的研究中，在所用刺激方面，并未分别为年轻和年长成年人使这些属性等同。在本研究中，收集了常模数据以测试这些属性中是否存在任何年龄差异。结果表明，年轻和年长成年人对自然和人造类别项目给出的评分呈正相关。然而，年龄差异也很明显，年长成年人总体上给出的评分高于年轻成年人。本文提出了一些建议和假设来解释这种年龄差异模式，这些建议和假设与健康的年轻和年长成年人可能如何表征类别概念有关。此外，还讨论了这些不同年龄评分对词汇语义加工可能产生的影响。本研究中明显的年龄差异表明，在为衰老的词汇语义加工研究选择刺激时，需要考虑适合年龄的常模评分，并且所呈现的常模数据提供了一种使类别刺激等同的方法。所有平均数的完整列表可在www.psychonomic.org/archive获取。
