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Adult age differences in judgments of semantic fit

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2004

DEBORAH M. LITTLE ,
KRISTEN J. PRENTICE  and
ARTHUR WINGFIELD
DEBORAH M. LITTLE
Affiliation:
Brandeis University
KRISTEN J. PRENTICE
Affiliation:
Brandeis University
ARTHUR WINGFIELD
Affiliation:
Brandeis University
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Abstract

A total of 130 young adults and 173 older adults gave goodness of fit ratings for sets of word alternatives for 123 English sentence frames. Word alternatives were semantically plausible in all cases but varied in the likelihood of their occurrence within the sentence frames. Adding support to the general belief that vocabulary and language knowledge are well preserved in normal aging, our results showed generally high agreement in goodness of fit ratings by the young and older adults. Differences that did occur appeared to be due to cohort differences in word usage and interests rather than underlying cognitive function. We suggest that this similarity in semantic judgments may help to explain why adult age differences in comprehension and memory for sentences are generally smaller than age differences for other examples of episodic memory.

Type
Research Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , March 2004 , pp. 135 - 143
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

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