Aging and language : maintenance of morphological representations in older adults


Article
Version acceptée / Accepted Manuscript

Date de publication

Identifiant ORCID de l’auteur

Contributrices et contributeurs

Direction de recherche

Publié dans

Frontiers in communication

Date de la Conférence

Lieu de la Conférence

Éditeur

Frontiers media

Cycle d'études

Programme

Mots-clés

  • Aging
  • Inflection morphology
  • Masked priming
  • Lexical decision
  • Lexical semantics
  • Orthographic processing
  • French

Organisme subventionnaire

Résumé

Résumé

Studies employing primed lexical decision tasks have revealed morphological facilitation effects in children and young adults. It is unknown if this effect is preserved or diminished in older adults. In fact, only few studies have investigated age-related changes in morphological processing and results are inconsistent across studies. To address this issue, we investigated inflection morphology compared to orthographic and semantic processing in young and older adults. Twenty-six adults aged 60–85 and 22 younger adults aged 19–28 participated. We probed verb recognition using a sandwich-masked primed lexical decision paradigm. We investigated lexical decision using different prime presentation times (PPTs) (33, 66, and 150 ms), and prime types with priming conditions involving orthographic (e.g., cassis—CASSE ‘blackcurrant—break’), regular inflection morphological (cassait—CASSE ‘broke—break’), and semantic primes (brise—CASSE ‘break—break’) and their controls, while measuring response accuracy and reaction times. Response accuracy analyses revealed that older participants performed at ceiling on the lexical decision task, and that accuracy levels were higher compared to young adults. Reaction-time data revealed effects of age group, priming condition, and an interaction of age group and morphological priming, but no PPT effects. Both young and older adults presented a significant facilitation effect (reduced reaction times) in the orthographic and morphological priming conditions. No semantic effects were observed in either group. Younger adults also showed a significantly stronger morphological priming effect, while older adults showed no difference between orthographic and morphological priming when comparing priming magnitudes. These findings suggest (1) that regular inflectional morphological processing benefits lexical access in younger French adults, confirming studies in other languages, and (2) that this advantage is reduced at older ages.

Table des matières

Notes

Notes

Autre version linguistique

Ensemble de données lié

Licence

Approbation

Évaluation

Complété par

Référencé par

Ce document diffusé sur Papyrus est la propriété exclusive des titulaires des droits d'auteur et est protégé par la Loi sur le droit d'auteur (L.R.C. (1985), ch. C-42). Sauf si le document est diffusé sous une licence Creative Commons, il ne peut être utilisé que dans le cadre d'une utilisation équitable et non commerciale comme le prévoit la Loi (i.e. à des fins d'étude privée ou de recherche, de critique ou de compte-rendu). Pour toute autre utilisation, une autorisation écrite des titulaires des droits d'auteur sera nécessaire.