Sailor Kevin M, Zimmerman Molly E, Sanders Amy E
Department of Psychology, Lehman College, City University of New York, Bronx, NY 10468-1589, USA.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2011 Dec;64(12):2383-91. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2011.596660. Epub 2011 Aug 18.
The degree to which the typical age of acquisition (AoA) of words and word frequency have separable influences on verbal production tasks has been strongly debated. To examine the overlap between these factors in verbal fluency tasks, the performance of Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients (N = 34) and normal elderly controls (N = 36) was compared on semantic (e.g., vegetables) and letter (e.g., words that begin with F) fluency tasks. These comparisons revealed that words generated for the semantic fluency task had an earlier AoA while words generated for the letter fluency task had a higher word frequency. Differences in AoA between AD patients and controls were larger for semantic than letter fluency. These results suggest that AoA has an effect on verbal production that is independent of word frequency and that AoA has a semantic locus.
单词的典型习得年龄（AoA）和词频对言语产出任务的影响在多大程度上相互独立，一直存在激烈争论。为了研究在言语流畅性任务中这些因素之间的重叠情况，我们比较了阿尔茨海默病（AD）患者（N = 34）和正常老年对照组（N = 36）在语义（如蔬菜）和字母（如以F开头的单词）流畅性任务中的表现。这些比较表明，为语义流畅性任务生成的单词具有更早的AoA，而为字母流畅性任务生成的单词具有更高的词频。AD患者和对照组在AoA上的差异，语义流畅性任务比字母流畅性任务更大。这些结果表明，AoA对言语产出有独立于词频的影响，并且AoA有一个语义位点。
