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How do we understand the age-related increase in semantic priming?
2023.02.22 Dr. FONG Cheuk Man Manson
Research Assistant Professor
Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies
Hong Kong Polytechnic University
How do we understand the age-related increase in semantic priming?
The semantic priming task is an invaluable tool for studying semantic processes in general and semantic impairment in language disorders in particular. To date, the vast majority of semantic priming research has been conducted in the visual modality based on the primed lexical decision task. Regarding cognitive aging, an interesting phenomenon that has been consistently observed is an age-related increase in priming effect, commonly referred to as hyperpriming. Intuitively, hyperpriming can be attributed to a more automatic activation of semantically related concepts, which would in turn imply an improvement in semantic processing in normal ageing. However, because hyperpriming is commonly observed in dementia, it is instead often taken as a sign of semantic anomaly. In the present seminar, we report an ongoing experiment that sheds light on this controversy. Specifically, a primed auditory lexical decision experiment was conducted with 100+ participants aged 18-81. The prime–target pairs were manipulated in both concreteness (concrete / abstract) and relationship (associative / categorical / both associative and categorical). The hyperpriming effect was found for both concrete and abstract pairs. Importantly, no effect of age was found in overall reaction time in the lexical decision task, suggesting that the hyperpriming effect was not due to slower reaction time in older adults. Instead, a larger priming effect was associated with faster reaction time, indicating a genuine age-related increase in semantic priming effect. Our result supported the hypothesis that older adults have improved semantic functions that enable them to automatically retrieve the semantic meanings of words, especially in the auditory domain. Beyond the behavioral findings, preliminary findings from ERP and fMRI experiments will be reported.
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