Wu Wei, Hoffman Paul
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, 7 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9JZ, UK.
R Soc Open Sci. 2022 Feb 16;9(2):211056. doi: 10.1098/rsos.211056. eCollection 2022 Feb.
Recent studies suggest that knowledge representations and control processes are the two key components underpinning semantic cognition, and are also crucial indicators of the shifting cognitive architecture of semantics in later life. Although there are many standardized assessments that provide measures of the quantity of semantic knowledge participants possess, normative data for tasks that probe semantic control processes are not yet available. Here, we present normative data from more than 200 young and older participants on a large set of stimuli in two semantic tasks, which probe controlled semantic processing (feature-matching task) and semantic knowledge (synonym judgement task). We verify the validity of our norms by replicating established age- and psycholinguistic-property-related effects on semantic cognition. Specifically, we find that older people have more detailed semantic knowledge than young people but have less effective semantic control processes. We also obtain expected effects of word frequency and inter-item competition on performance. Parametrically varied difficulty levels are defined for half of the stimuli based on participants' behavioural performance, allowing future studies to produce customized sets of experimental stimuli based on our norms. We provide all stimuli, data and code used for analysis, in the hope that they are useful to other researchers.
最近的研究表明，知识表征和控制过程是支撑语义认知的两个关键组成部分，也是晚年语义认知结构变化的关键指标。虽然有许多标准化评估可测量参与者所拥有的语义知识量，但用于探究语义控制过程的任务的规范数据尚未可得。在此，我们呈现了来自200多名年轻和年长参与者在两个语义任务中的大量刺激下的规范数据，这两个任务分别探究受控语义处理（特征匹配任务）和语义知识（同义词判断任务）。我们通过复制已确立的与年龄和心理语言学属性相关的对语义认知的影响来验证我们规范的有效性。具体而言，我们发现老年人比年轻人拥有更详细的语义知识，但语义控制过程效率较低。我们还获得了词频和项目间竞争对表现的预期影响。基于参与者的行为表现，为一半的刺激定义了参数变化的难度级别，这使得未来的研究能够根据我们的规范生成定制的实验刺激集。我们提供了用于分析的所有刺激、数据和代码，希望它们对其他研究人员有用。
