Bowles N L, Poon L W
Exp Aging Res. 1981 Winter;7(4):417-25. doi: 10.1080/03610738108259822.
The present study concerns the effect of aging on speed of lexical access. Normative word-frequency was manipulated in a lexical decision task with older and younger adults. Three methods of comparing processing time in the lexical access stage across age groups were evaluated: the subtraction method, the analysis of covariance, and the additive-factor method. The adequacy of the subtraction method was questioned because of the difficulty of finding a control task identical to the experimental task in all processing stages except lexical access. The analysis of covariance was considered to be inconclusive in this kind of application because of the correlation between the covariate and the independent variable, age. The additive-factor method appeared to be a viable alternative to these two analyses. Within this framework, the lack of an interaction between the two variables, age and word-frequency, indicates that the factors affected different stages of processing. Since word-frequency has been shown to affect the lexical access stage, the present result was taken to suggest that aging does not affect speed of lexical access.
本研究关注衰老对词汇通达速度的影响。在一项词汇判断任务中，对老年人和年轻人操纵了规范词频。评估了三种跨年龄组比较词汇通达阶段加工时间的方法：减法法、协方差分析和加法因素法。减法法的充分性受到质疑，因为除了词汇通达之外，很难找到在所有加工阶段都与实验任务相同的控制任务。协方差分析在这类应用中被认为没有定论，因为协变量与自变量年龄之间存在相关性。加法因素法似乎是这两种分析的可行替代方法。在此框架内，年龄和词频这两个变量之间缺乏交互作用，表明这些因素影响了不同的加工阶段。由于词频已被证明会影响词汇通达阶段，因此目前的结果被认为表明衰老不会影响词汇通达速度。
