Balota D A, Duchek J M
Department of Psychology, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri 63130.
Psychol Aging. 1988 Mar;3(1):84-93. doi: 10.1037//0882-7974.3.1.84.
An experiment was conducted to address age-related differences in lexical access, spreading activation, and pronunciation. Both young and older adults participated in a delayed pronunciation task to trace the time course of lexical access and a semantic priming task to trace the time course of spreading activation. In the delayed pronunciation task, subjects were presented a word and then, after varying delays, were presented a cue to pronounce the word aloud. Older adults benefited considerably more from the preexposure to the word than did the younger adults, suggesting an age-related difference in lexical access time. In the semantic priming pronunciation task, semantic relatedness (related vs. neutral), strength of the relationship (high vs. low), and prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony (200 ms, 350 ms, 500 ms, 650 ms, and 800 ms) were factorially crossed with age to investigate age-related differences in the buildup of semantic activation across time. The results from this task indicated that the activation pattern of the older adults closely mimicked that of the younger adults. Finally, the results of both tasks indicated that older adults were slower at both their onset to pronounce and their actual production durations (i.e., from onset to offset) in the pronunciation task. The results were interpreted as suggesting that input and output processes are slowed with age, but that the basic retrieval mechanism of spreading activation is spared by age.
进行了一项实验，以研究词汇通达、扩散激活和发音方面与年龄相关的差异。年轻和年长的成年人都参与了一项延迟发音任务，以追踪词汇通达的时间进程，以及一项语义启动任务，以追踪扩散激活的时间进程。在延迟发音任务中，向受试者呈现一个单词，然后在不同的延迟后，呈现一个提示，让他们大声读出这个单词。与年轻成年人相比，年长成年人从单词的预暴露中获益更多，这表明在词汇通达时间上存在与年龄相关的差异。在语义启动发音任务中，语义相关性（相关与中性）、关系强度（高与低）以及启动刺激与目标刺激的起始异步性（200毫秒、350毫秒、500毫秒、650毫秒和800毫秒）与年龄进行析因交叉，以研究随着时间推移语义激活积累中与年龄相关的差异。这项任务的结果表明，年长成年人的激活模式与年轻成年人的激活模式非常相似。最后，两项任务的结果都表明，年长成年人在发音任务中的发音起始和实际发音持续时间（即从起始到结束）都较慢。这些结果被解释为表明输入和输出过程随着年龄增长而减慢，但扩散激活的基本检索机制不受年龄影响。
