The main purpose of this study was to report agebased subjective age-of-acquisition (AoA) norms for 600 Turkish words. A total of 115 children, 100 young adults, 115 middle-aged adults, and 127 older adults provided AoA estimates for 600 words on a 7-point scale. The intraclass correlations suggested high reliability, and the AoA estimates were highly correlated across the four age groups. Children gave earlier AoA estimates than the three adult groups; this was true for high-frequency as well as low-frequency words. In addition to the means and standard deviations of the AoA estimates, we report word frequency, concreteness, and imageability ratings, as well as word length measures (numbers of syllables and letters), for the 600 words as supplemental materials. The present ratings represent a potentially useful database for researchers working on lexical processing as well as other aspects of cognitive processing, such as autobiographical memory.
Fuzzy Trace Theory argues that false memories arise from a weak verbatim memory along with strong encoding of the meaning (gist). The present study simultaneously investigated the effects of the strength of both the gist and the verbatim information on false memories. Exp. 1 was carried out to compare false memories for common and rare words in recall and recognition. In Exp. 2 a control for possible testing effects was added, and participants were given a recognition test with no preceding recall test. Qualitative judgements (Remember vs Know) regarding words judged as old on the recognition test were also collected in Exp. 2. Both experiments showed that false memories were more likely when weak verbatim items occurred along with strong gist (as with common words) than only with weak gist encoding (as with rare words). Moreover, participants were more likely to choose falsely physically similar distractors for rare words than for common words. Semantically similar distractors, on the other hand, were more likely to be selected for common than for rare words. These results provide further support for the fuzzy trace theory explanation of false memories. However, some weaknesses of this model regarding false memories are also discussed.
The purpose of the present study was to address the effects of urban vs. rural upbringing on earliest autobiographical memories. We asked children (aged 10-13) brought up in an urban vs. in a rural setting to report their earliest memories. Earliest memories of children from rural areas were a year later than those of children from urban areas. Moreover, memories of children from rural areas were more likely to contain social interactions and tended to be less detailed compared to those from urban areas. The groups, however, were not different in specificity, autonomous orientation, or emotion. Results are discussed in the context of a social cultural developmental approach.
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