Age-linked declines in retrieving orthographic knowledge: Empirical, practical, and theoretical implications.

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 14(1) of Psychology and Aging (see record 2008-09595-001). The article contained an error. In Table 1 on page 652, the values for rated spelling ability at age 20 and at current age were reversed for older and oldest adults. The corrected table is included in the erratum, with values that have been changed in bold.] This study developed and tested a Transmission Deficit hypothesis of how aging affects retrieval of orthographic knowledge. Young, older, and very old adults heard a tape-recorded series of difficult-to-spell words of high and low frequency, spoken slowly, clearly and repeatedly, and wrote down each word at their own pace. With perceptual errors and vocabulary differences factored out, misspellings increased with aging, especially for high-frequency words. In addition, data from a metamemory questionnaire indicated that the oldest adults were aware of their declining ability to spell. These findings were not due to general slowing, educational factors, hours per week spent reading, writing, or solving crossword puzzles, or age-linked declines in monitoring or detecting self-produced errors. However, the results fit Transmission Deficit predictions, and suggested an age-linked decline in retrieval of orthographic knowledge that resembles age-linked declines in spoken word retrieval observed in many other studies. Practical implications of this age-linked decline for conceptions of normal aging are noted. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sequencing, Speech Production, and Selective Effects of Aging on Phonological and Morphological Speech Errors.

To test age-linked predictions of node structure theory (NST) and other theories, young and older adults performed a task that elicited large numbers of phonological and morphological speech errors. Stimuli were visually presented words containing either /p/ or /b/, and participants changed the /p/ to /b/ or vice versa and produced the resulting word as quickly as possible. For example, the correct response was "bunk" for the stimulus PUNK, and "ripped" for RIBBED. Consistent with NST predictions, the elicited speech errors exhibited selective effects of aging. Some error types decreased with aging. For example, young adults produced more nonsequential substitution errors (as a percentage of total errors) than older adults (e.g., intended bills misproduced as "gills"). However, other error types remained constant or increased with aging. For example, older adults produced more omission errors than young adults, especially omissions involving inflectional endings (e.g.. intended ripped misproduced as "np"). In addition, older adults exhibited special difficulties with 2 types of phonological and morphological sequencing processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Orthographic error monitoring in old age: Lexical and sublexical availability during perception and production.

Previous research suggests that older adults suffer declines in producing accurate spellings but retain the ability to accurately detect misspellings. The preservation of perception in the face of impaired production has been used to support a model of aging in which age impairs access to linguistic representations under specific circumstances, while representations themselves remain intact. The current research tests two predictions of this Transmission Deficit Hypothesis (TDH): first, that the differential effect of age on perception and production occurs when tasks are equated on response requirements and underlying representations, and second, that both word and spelling frequency interact to determine the effect of age on performance. Results of two error monitoring tasks supported the predictions of the TDH, demonstrating age-related production impairments that interacted with both word and spelling frequency, but no impairment of older adults' spelling perception, even for low frequency words or spellings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of age and Alzheimer's disease on recognition of gated spoken words

This study investigated the effects of normal aging and Alzheimer's disease on listeners' ability to recognize gated spoken words. Groups of healthy young adults, healthy older adults, and adults with Alzheimer's disease were presented isolated gated spoken words. Theoretical predictions of the Cohort model of spoken word recognition (Marslen-Wilson, 1984) were tested, employing both between-group and within-group comparisons. The findings for the young adults supported the Cohort model's predictions. The findings for the older adult groups revealed different effects for age and disease. These results are interpreted in relation to the theoretical predictions, the findings of previous gating studies, and differentiating age from disease-related changes in spoken word recognition.     

Inhibitory processes and spoken word recognition in young and older adults: The interaction of lexical competition and semantic context.

Two experiments were conducted to examine the importance of inhibitory abilities and semantic context to spoken word recognition in older and young adults. In Experiment 1, identification scores were obtained in 3 contexts: single words, low-predictability sentences, and high-predictability sentences. Additionally, identification performance was examined as a function of neighborhood density (number of items phonetically similar to a target word). Older adults had greater difficulty than young adults recognizing words with many neighbors (hard words). However, older adults also exhibited greater benefits as a result of adding contextual information. Individual differences in inhibitory abilities contributed significantly to recognition performance for lexically hard words but not for lexically easy words. The roles of inhibitory abilities and linguistic knowledge in explaining age-related impairments in spoken word recognition are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging on the input versus output side: Theoretical implications of age-linked asymmetries between detecting versus retrieving orthographic information.

This experiment tested for age-linked asymmetries predicted under Node Structure theory (NST; D.G. MacKay & D. M. Burke, 1990) between detecting versus retrieving orthographic information. Older adults detected that briefly presented words were correctly spelled (e.g., endeavor) or misspelled (e.g., endeavuor) as readily as did young adults. However, they were less able than young adults to retrieve the correctly and incorrectly spelled words that they had seen. These age-linked asymmetries were not due to educational factors, stimulus characteristics, sensory-level factors, task complexity, floor or ceiling effects, general slowing, or cohort-related activities, but they were consistent with NST predictions and with similar asymmetries in a wide range of other studies. By contrast, repetition deficits in detecting and retrieving repeated- versus unrepeated-letter misspellings (e.g., elderdly vs. elderkly) were symmetrical or equivalent in magnitude for young and older adults. Implications for a wide range of theories of cognitive aging and of repetition deficits are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

New age-linked asymmetries: Aging and the processing of familiar versus novel language on the input versus output side.

This research demonstrates 3 new age-linked asymmetries between identifying versus retrieving phonological information. Young and older adults read aloud familiar isolated words (e.g., mind) and novel pseudowords (e.g., mond) in a production task and identified lexical status for identical stimuli in a comprehension task. Young adults made fewer errors than older adults in production but not comprehension (an age-related input-output asymmetry), and they produced pseudowords but not words with fewer errors than older adults (a lexical-status asymmetry). The lexical-status asymmetry also occurred for response onset times but not for output durations (an onset-output asymmetry). All 3 asymmetries were predicted under the transmission deficit hypothesis (D. G. MacKay & D. M. Burke, 1990) but contradict theories such as general slowing that cannot explain why aging affects some types of information processing more than others. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adult age differences in implicit and explicit memory: Time course and encoding effects.

Young and older adults were tested at three delays on word-stem completion or cued recall following semantic or structural word judgments. Identical three-letter stems were present at retrieval for both implicit (completion) and explicit (cued recall) tasks; only the intention to recall list words differed. The young adults outperformed the older adults on both implicit and explicit task at all test delays. Under some conditions, the older but not the young adults performed more poorly on cued recall than on stem completion, suggesting a possible failure to use implicitly available information to support explicit remembering. These results suggest that some forms of implicit memory decline with normal aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Asymmetric aging effects on semantic and phonological processes: Naming in the picture-word interference task.

In 2 experiments, participants named pictures while ignoring auditory word distractors. For pictures with homophone names (e.g., ball, distractors semantically related to the nondepicted meaning (e.g., prom) facilitated naming by top-down phonological connections for young but not for older adults. Slowing from unrelated distractors and facilitation from phonologically related distractors were age invariant except in distractors that were both semantically and phonologically related. Only distractors semantically related to the picture interfered more for older than younger adults. These results are inconsistent with age-linked deficits in inhibition of irrelevant information from either internal or external sources. Rather, aging affects priming transmission in a connectionist network with asymmetric effects on semantic and phonological connections involved in comprehension and production, respectively. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Factors influencing word naming in younger and older adults.

The present study examined age differences in the influence of 3 factors that previous research has shown to influence word-naming performance. The influence of word frequency, orthographic length, and orthographic neighborhood measures was examined using large-scale regression analyses on the naming latencies for 2,820 words. Thirty-one younger adults and 29 older adults named all of these words, and age differences in the influence of these factors were examined. The results revealed that all 3 factors predicted reliable amounts of variance in word-naming latencies for both groups. However, older adults showed a larger influence of word frequency and reduced influences of orthographic length and orthographic neighborhood density compared with younger adults. Overall, these results suggest that lexical level factors increase in influence in older adults whereas sublexical factors decrease in influence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Understanding unfamiliar words: The influence of processing resources, vocabulary knowledge, and age": Clarification regarding McGinnis and Zelinski (2000).

Reports a clarification regarding the original article "Understanding unfamiliar words: The influence of processing resources, vocabulary knowledge, and age" by Debra McGinnis and Elizabeth M. Zelinski (Psychology and Aging, 2000[Jun], Vol 15[2], 335-350). Please note that the Action Editor for this article was Anderson D. Smith. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2000-03816-012.) In a 2-experiment design, the authors assessed the role of age and ability in defining unfamiliar words from context. In Experiment 1, 60 adults aged 18-33 and 60 adults aged 61-96 read passages with cues to the meaning of rare words, then defined them. Older adults produced fewer components of the words' meanings and were more likely to produce generalized interpretations of the precise meaning. In Experiment 2, 726 adults aged 30-97 selected definitions from 4 choices: the exact definition, a generalized interpretation of the exact definition, a generalized interpretation of the story, and definition irrelevant information from the story. Adults over age 75 selected fewer precise definitions and more generalized interpretations of the story than younger ones. Findings suggest that older adults may have special difficulties in deriving the meaning of unfamiliar words from context. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Auditory habituation in young and older adults: The verbal transformation effect.

In 3 experiments, auditory massed repetition was used to examine age-related differences in habituation by means of the verbal transformation paradigm. Participants heard 10 words (5 high frequency and 5 low frequency), each presented 180 times, and they reported perceived changes in the repeated words (verbal transformations). In these experiments, older adults reported fewer illusory percepts than young adults. Older adults' loss of auditory acuity and slowing of processing, stimulus degradation (in young adults), and instructions biasing the report of these illusory percepts did not account for the fewer illusory percepts reported by the older adults. These findings suggest that older adults' reduced susceptibility to habituation arises from centrally located declines in the transmission of information within the word recognition pathway. The discussion focuses on the implications that these age-related declines may have on word identification during on-line speech perception. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Performance in Auditory and Visual Emotional Stroop Tasks: A Comparison of Older and Younger Adults.

Research has shown age-related declines in the cognitive ability to inhibit irrelevant information. Thirty-six younger adults (mean age = 22 years) and 36 older adults (mean age = 74 years) performed 2 versions of an emotional Stroop task. In one, they made lexical decisions to emotion words spoken in 1 of several tones of voice. Latencies were longer for test words spoken in an incongruent tone of voice, but only for older adults. In another, words were displayed on a computer screen in a colored font, and participants quickly named the font color. Latencies were longer for test words high on arousal, but only for older adults. Results are discussed in terms of inhibitory cognitive processes, attention, and theories of emotional development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Integration of orthographic, conceptual, and episodic information on implicit and explicit tests.

Examined how a prior encoding episode affected the integration of orthographic and conceptual information during incidental and intentional retrieval. 180 college students studied word lists with either shallow (counting vowels in each word) or deep (rating pleasantness) encoding tasks. Half of the Ss received implicit or explicit test instructions for a word fragment completion test containing orthographic cues (letters) and semantically related words. In the implicit condition, the word fragments had to be completed, while the explicit condition involved a memory test for the words seen earlier. On both the implicit and explicit tests, performance improved with an increase in the number of letters and words. Conceptual information processing had a larger effect in intentional retrieval than in incidental retrieval. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Building episodic connections: Changes in episodic priming with age and dementia.

Previous studies of associative encoding that used explicit retrieval tasks have shown both age- and dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT)-related declines, but such results may be biased by group differences in explicit retrieval. In the present experiment, the authors assessed implicit associative encoding for 25 younger adults (ages 18–25), 73 healthy older adults (ages 59–91), and 65 adults with DAT (ages 59–91) during a speeded word-naming task using an episodic priming measure. Episodic priming refers to the facilitation in responding to a target word after repetition of both words in a prime–target pair, in comparison with simple repetition of the target word with a new prime on each presentation. In contrast with other studies of implicit associative encoding that did not use an implicit episodic priming measure, the present study found both age- and DAT-related declines in associative encoding under conditions of massed learning trials. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adult age differences in regional cerebral blood flow during visual world identification: evidence from H215O PET

We used H215O PET to investigate adult age differences in regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) during the performance of a visual word identification task. The study participants were 20 healthy, right-handed men: 10 young adults between 18 and 27 years of age, and 10 older adults between 63 and 75 years of age. The word identification task comprised six blocks of test trials representing four task conditions; subjects responded manually. The task conditions varied with regard to whether semantic retrieval was required (e.g., word/nonword discrimination vs simple response to each stimulus) and with regard to the difficulty of visual encoding (e.g., words presented normally vs words with asterisks inserted between adjacent letters). Each subject performed all six trial blocks, concurrently with each of six H215O PET scans. Analyses of quantitative CBF data obtained from the arterial time-activity curve demonstrated a significant age-related decline in global CBF rate. Analyses of the changes in rCBF between task conditions indicated that retrieval of semantic information sufficient to distinguish words from nonwords is mediated by a ventral occipitotemporal cortical pathway. Specific areas within this pathway were also associated with visual encoding processes. Several rCBF activations were significantly greater for young adults than for older adults, indicating an age-related decline in processing efficiency within this ventral occipitotemporal pathway. Although the performance data demonstrated a greater age-related slowing for visual encoding than for semantic retrieval, these age-related performance changes were not associated with corresponding changes in rCBF activation.     

The special role of rimes in the description, use, and acquisition of English orthography.

The links between spellings and sounds in a large set of English words with consonant–vowel–consonant phonological structure were examined. Orthographic rimes, or units consisting of a vowel grapheme and a final consonant grapheme, had more stable pronunciations than either individual vowels or initial consonant-plus-vowel units. In 2 large-scale studies of word pronunciation, the consistency of pronunciation of the orthographic rime accounted for variance in latencies and errors beyond that contributed by the consistency of pronunciation of the individual graphemes and by other factors. In 3 experiments, as well, children and adults made more errors on words with less consistently pronounced orthographic rimes than on words with more consistently pronounced orthographic rimes. Relations between spellings and sounds in the simple monomorphemic words of English are more predictable when the level of onsets and rimes is taken into account than when only graphemes and phonemes are considered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Affect dynamics, affective forecasting, and aging": Correction to Nielsen, Knutson, and Carstensen (2008).

Reports an error in "Affect dynamics, affective forecasting, and aging" by Lisbeth Nielsen, Brian Knutson and Laura L. Carstensen (Emotion, 2008[Jun], Vol 8[3], 318-330). The first author of the article was listed as being affiliated with both the National Institute on Aging and the Department of Psychology, Stanford University. Dr. Nielsen would like to clarify that the research for this article was conducted while she was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. The copyright notice should also have been listed as "In the Public Domain." (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2008-06717-002.) Affective forecasting, experienced affect, and recalled affect were compared in younger and older adults during a task in which participants worked to win and avoid losing small monetary sums. Dynamic changes in affect were measured along valence and arousal dimensions, with probes during both anticipatory and consummatory task phases. Older and younger adults displayed distinct patterns of affect dynamics. Younger adults reported increased negative arousal during loss anticipation and positive arousal during gain anticipation. In contrast, older adults reported increased positive arousal during gain anticipation but showed no increase in negative arousal on trials involving loss anticipation. Additionally, younger adults reported large increases in valence after avoiding an anticipated loss, but older adults did not. Younger, but not older, adults exhibited forecasting errors on the arousal dimension, underestimating increases in arousal during anticipation of gains and losses and overestimating increases in arousal in response to gain outcomes. Overall, the findings are consistent with a growing literature suggesting that older people experience less negative emotion than their younger counterparts and further suggest that they may better predict dynamic changes in affect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Orthographic effects on phoneme monitoring

A widely used task in the research on spoken word recognition is phoneme monitoring, in which subjects have to detect phonemes in spoken words. It is generally assumed that this task is performed using phonetic or phonological representations of words only. To test whether an orthographic representation of the words is employed as well, an experiment was conducted in which Dutch subjects monitored for phonemes with either a primary or secondary spelling in phonologically matched spoken words and nonwords. Phoneme monitoring times were slower when the phoneme had a secondary spelling than when it had a primary spelling. The effect was greater after than before the uniqueness point of the word, and monitoring times were faster for words than for nonwords. These findings indicate that an orthographic representation of words is engaged in phoneme monitoring.     

Older adults' use of metacognitive knowledge in source monitoring: Spared monitoring but impaired control.

While episodic memory declines with age, metacognitive monitoring is spared. The current study explored whether older adults can use their preserved metacognitive knowledge to make source guesses in the absence of source memory. Through repetition, words from two sources (italic vs. bold text type) differed in memorability. There were no age differences in monitoring this difference despite an age difference in memory. Older adults used their metacognitive knowledge to make source guesses but showed a deficit in varying their source guessing based on word recognition. Therefore, older adults may not fully benefit from metacognitive knowledge about sources in source monitoring. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)