Age-related effects in compound production: Intact lexical representations but more effortful encoding

Age-related effects in compound production: Evidence from a double-object picture naming task

“…We previously conducted a PWI study very similar to the one reported here, with young and elderly participants, with compound naming and with distractors in the same conditions as in the present study (Lorenz et al, in press). But unlike the present study, participants named single pictures (e.g., of a sunflower or a toadstool ) with compound names.…”

“…The difference between reaction times in incongruent and congruent conditions is known as the Simon effect. Van der Lubbe and Verleger reported a larger Simon effect for older than for young adult participants, reflecting a decline of attentional control processes with age (van der Lubbe and Verleger, 2002; see also Bialystok, Craik, Klein, & Viswanathan, 2004; Campbell, Grady, Ng, & Hasher, 2012; Lorenz et al, in press). Furthermore, Piai, Roelofs, Acheson, and Takashima (2013) provided evidence for domain-general attentional control in verbal and non-verbal tasks.…”

“…Given the complexity of the processes underlying speech production, a decline in non-verbal cognitive functions might be one of the main reasons for word-finding difficulties in older speakers (for an alternative explanation, see Ramscar, Hendrix, Shaoul, Milin, & Baayen, 2014). While semantic-conceptual, lexical, and phonological representations themselves seem to be preserved in the elderly, the transmission of information between these representations seems to be particularly affected by age (Burke, MacKay, Worthley, & Wade, 1991; see also Burke & MacKay, 1997; Burke, MacKay, & James, 2000; Burke & Shafto, 2004; Lorenz, Regel, Zwitserlood, & Abdel Rahman, in press; Rastle & Burke, 1996; Taylor & Burke, 2002). This might explain why word-finding difficulties, including tip-of-the-tongue states in connected speech (e.g., Meyer & Bock, 1992), increase with age (Burke et al, 1991).…”

“…In contrast to the evidence obtained from connected speech, older and young speakers often do not differ when naming single pictures (e.g., Belke & Meyer, 2007; Bowles, 1994; Feyereisen, Demaeght, & Samson, 1998; but see Verhaegen & Poncelet, 2013), and effects of semantically or phonologically related distractor words in single-picture naming are often not affected by age (e.g., Belke & Meyer, 2007; Mortensen, Meyer, & Humphreys, 2008; but see Taylor & Burke, 2002). This might be different with compound targets, which require access to, and combination of, multiple lexical morpheme representations, and thus are likely to put greater demands on word-form retrieval and morpho-phonological encoding than simple nouns (Lorenz et al, in press; for converging data from aphasia, see Blanken, 2000; Lorenz, Heide, & Burchert, 2014; Lorenz & Zwitserlood, 2014; but see Fiorentino & Poeppel, 2007). Some studies indicate that word-finding problems in the elderly especially occur when demands on cognitive load are high, for example, when two or more object pictures are simultaneously presented for spoken naming (e.g., Belke & Meyer, 2007; Mortensen et al, 2008; see also Meyer, 1997; Meyer, Sleiderink, & Levelt, 1998; Wagner, Jescheniak, & Schriefers, 2010).…”

Mental Chronometry of Speaking in Dialogue: Semantic Interference Turns into Facilitation

“…Our sample size was determined prior to data collection through a power analysis that simulated the outcome of an LMM model testing for semantic interference at SOA-100ms (simr package, Green et al, 2016). We assumed an interference effect of 22.5ms, which corresponds in size to those found in previous PWI studies (e.g., Lorenz et al, 2018). With 32 participants we reached a power estimate of 85.8% chance (95% confidence interval: 83.48, 87.91) for detecting the hypothesized interference effect.…”