Kavé Gitit, Samuel-Enoch Keren, Adiv Shiri
Department of Education and Psychology, The Open University, Ra'anana, Israel.
Psychol Aging. 2009 Mar;24(1):17-27. doi: 10.1037/a0014579.
This article examines whether age-related difficulties in word retrieval are reflected in the lexical frequency of the nouns selected for production. Participants (N = 136; age range 20-85 years) completed a picture-naming test, a semantic fluency task, and a picture description task. Each noun in the speech samples was examined for its lexical frequency according to published word counts and was rated subjectively by 40 young and 40 older adults. In addition, the cumulative occurrence of each noun was calculated across all descriptions. Cumulative analysis was conducted on fluency protocols as well. Results show that age was associated with a decrease in total scores on structured single-word production tests as well as a decrease in the lexical frequency of nouns selected for production. Age was also associated with the production of words that appeared in 1 picture description only or in 1 fluency protocol only. Instead of selecting the most common nouns and thus avoiding age-associated retrieval difficulties, older speakers appear to produce more infrequent nouns, most likely because they have a larger vocabulary from which to choose these nouns.
本文探讨了与年龄相关的词汇提取困难是否体现在用于生成的名词的词汇频率上。参与者（N = 136；年龄范围20 - 85岁）完成了一项图片命名测试、一项语义流畅性任务和一项图片描述任务。根据已发表的词频统计，对言语样本中的每个名词进行词汇频率检查，并由40名年轻人和40名老年人进行主观评分。此外，计算了所有描述中每个名词的累积出现次数。还对流畅性协议进行了累积分析。结果表明，年龄与结构化单字生成测试的总分下降以及用于生成的名词的词汇频率下降有关。年龄还与仅出现在1个图片描述或仅出现在1个流畅性协议中的单词的生成有关。年长者似乎不是选择最常见的名词从而避免与年龄相关的提取困难，而是生成更多低频名词，很可能是因为他们有更大的词汇量可供选择这些名词。
