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. 2019 Dec;45(12):2267-2289.
doi: 10.1037/xlm0000699. Epub 2019 Mar 18.

Converging semantic and phonological information in lexical retrieval and selection in young and older adults

Abhilasha A Kumar  1 , David A Balota  1 , Julia Habbert  1 , Michele Scaltritti  2 , Geoffrey B Maddox  3
Affiliations

Converging semantic and phonological information in lexical retrieval and selection in young and older adults

Abhilasha A Kumar et al. J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2019 Dec.

Abstract

The present experiments investigated the influence of combined phonological and semantic information on lexical retrieval, metacognitive retrieval states, and selection in an immediate multiple-choice task. Younger and older adults attempted to retrieve words (e.g., abdicate) from low-frequency word definitions. Retrieval was preceded by primes that were "both" semantically and phonologically related (e.g., abandon), phonologically related (e.g., abdomen), semantically related (e.g., resign), or unrelated (e.g., pink). Younger and older adults benefited from phonological primes in retrieval, and also showed reduced, but reliable, facilitation from "both" primes. Younger and older adults also indicated that they were likely to "know" the answer more often after any related primes compared with unrelated primes. Because there was no facilitation in actual retrieval after semantic primes, this reflects a false "knowing" response. After each retrieval attempt, participants were given the correct answer along with the 4 primes in a multiple-choice test. Both younger and older adults were likely to false alarm to the "both" and semantic alternatives. When instructed that the prime was not the answer, younger adults decreased their false alarms, but not the older adults. With masked, briefly presented primes, younger adults mimicked the false alarms shown by older adults, suggesting that the high false alarm rates in older adults reflect an inability to discriminate the source of activation. The present experiments provide strong evidence for age-invariant phonological facilitation, and also suggest that overlapping semantic information moderates the facilitatory effect of phonological information on retrieval, and also produces age-related differences on an immediate multiple-choice task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Experiment trial procedure.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Mean ratings for PRIME:TARGET word pairs in sound and meaning-based rating task conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Error bars represent standard errors of the mean
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Mean Levenshtein distances for PRIME:TARGET word pairs. Error bars represent standard errors of the mean.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Retrieval state trials split across age in Experiments 1, 2 and 3. Error bars represent standard errors of the mean.
Figure 5.
Figure 5.
Target retrieval accuracy in Experiments 1, 2 and 3. Error bars represent standard errors of the mean.
Figure 6.
Figure 6.
Comparing performance on the multiple-choice task in Experiments 2 and 3, for trials in which participants were given “both” and semantic primes. Error bars represent standard errors of the mean.
Figure 7.
Figure 7.
Predicted probabilities of target retrieval accuracy as a function of prime-target association ratings and item difficulty collapsed across Experiments 1, 2 and 3.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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