Madden D J
Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina 27710.
Psychol Aging. 1988 Jun;3(2):167-72. doi: 10.1037//0882-7974.3.2.167.
I investigated adult age differences in the efficiency of feature-extraction processes during visual word recognition. Participants were 24 young adults (M age = 21.0 years) and 24 older adults (M age = 66.5 years). On each trial, subjects made a word/nonword discrimination (i.e., lexical decision) regarding a target letter-string that was presented as the final item of a sentence context. The target was presented either intact or degraded visually (by the presence of asterisks between adjacent letters). Age differences in lexical decisions speed were greater for degraded targets than for intact targets, suggesting an age-related slowing in the extraction of feature-level information. For degraded word targets, however, the amount of performance benefit provided by the sentence context was greater for older adults than for young adults. It thus appears that an age-related deficiency at an early stage of word recognition is accompanied by an increased contribution from semantic context.
我研究了成年人在视觉单词识别过程中特征提取过程效率的年龄差异。参与者包括24名年轻成年人（平均年龄 = 21.0岁）和24名老年人（平均年龄 = 66.5岁）。在每次试验中，受试者对作为句子上下文最后一项呈现的目标字母串进行单词/非单词辨别（即词汇判断）。目标以完整或视觉上退化的形式呈现（通过在相邻字母之间插入星号）。对于退化目标，词汇判断速度的年龄差异大于完整目标，这表明在特征级信息提取方面存在与年龄相关的减慢。然而，对于退化的单词目标，句子上下文为老年人提供的表现提升量大于年轻人。因此，似乎单词识别早期阶段与年龄相关的缺陷伴随着语义上下文贡献的增加。
