Ouyang Mingkun, Cai Xiao, Zhang Qingfang
Department of Psychology, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China.
Front Psychol. 2020 Feb 27;11:338. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00338. eCollection 2020.
The mechanism underlying the age difference in spoken word production remains controversial. We used a two-step approach proposed by Gollan and Brown (2006) to investigate the semantic and phonological retrieval deficits when tip-of-the-tongue occurs in young and older adults. Importantly, we controlled the inhibition ability in both older and young groups. In experiment 1 with a people pictures naming task, older adults produced more TOTs than young adults, and they suffered from phonological retrieval deficit rather than semantic retrieval deficit in speaking. In experiment 2 with a priming paradigm, participants were presented semantically related or phonologically related names before target pictures, which formed semantic or phonological priming conditions for lexical access. Compared with young adults, older adults showed a greater effect of phonological priming on decreasing TOTs occurrence. For semantic retrieval deficit, older adults exhibited a smaller phonological facilitation effect and a larger semantic interference effect than young adults. For phonological retrieval deficit, older adults presented a larger phonological facilitation effect in the first-name related priming condition than the first-syllable related priming condition, whereas young adults showed similar facilitation effects between the two phonological priming conditions. Our findings provide consistent evidence for the transmission deficit hypothesis, and highlight that aging affects bidirectional connections between semantic and phonological nodes in speech production.
口语产出中年龄差异背后的机制仍存在争议。我们采用了戈兰和布朗（2006年）提出的两步法，来研究年轻人和老年人出现舌尖现象时的语义和语音检索缺陷。重要的是，我们控制了老年组和青年组的抑制能力。在实验1的人物图片命名任务中，老年人比年轻人产生更多的舌尖现象，并且他们在说话时存在语音检索缺陷而非语义检索缺陷。在实验2的启动范式中，在呈现目标图片之前向参与者呈现语义相关或语音相关的名字，这为词汇提取形成了语义或语音启动条件。与年轻人相比，老年人在减少舌尖现象发生方面表现出更大的语音启动效应。对于语义检索缺陷，老年人比年轻人表现出更小的语音促进效应和更大的语义干扰效应。对于语音检索缺陷，老年人在名字相关启动条件下比首音节相关启动条件下呈现出更大的语音促进效应，而年轻人在两种语音启动条件下表现出相似的促进效应。我们的研究结果为传递缺陷假说提供了一致的证据，并强调衰老会影响言语产生中语义和语音节点之间的双向连接。
