Charlie Brown Versus Snow White: The Effects of Descriptiveness on Young and Older Adults' Retrieval of Proper Names

Abstract

The nondescriptive nature of proper names has been suggested as one reason that people experience particular difficulty learning and recalling names. This experiment tested whether the exacerbated difficulty experienced by older adults in retrieving proper names is partly due to names' nondescriptive quality. Young and older participants named pictures of well-known cartoon characters that have either descriptive names (e.g., Snow White, Big Bird) or nondescriptive names (e.g., Charlie Brown, Garfield). Older adults were particularly impaired at retrieving nondescriptive names. Results indicate that theories of name memory must represent the nondescriptive nature of names and account for the decreased retrieval difficulty for descriptive compared with nondescriptive names in aging.

How Name Descriptiveness Impacts Proper Name Learning in Young and Older Adults

“…Herein, the term “non-descriptive” is used to designate the category into which most names fall, because most names do not provide information about the referent’s mental or physical qualities (see also Fogler & James, 2007). In Western cultures, nicknames are occasionally derived from someone’s appearance or personality (Hall, Waxman, Brédart, & Nicolay, 2003; e.g., a child with prominent cheeks may be nicknamed Chubby Cheeks ; a talkative person may be called Chatterbox ), but most people are not primarily known by such descriptive nicknames.…”

“…Brédart and Valentine (1998) discovered that among well-known cartoon characters, those with names describing their salient physical or psychological properties were correctly named more often than those with non-descriptive names. Fogler and James (2007) extended Brédart and Valentine’s experiment, testing a group of older adult participants in addition to a college-aged (young adult) group to determine whether name descriptiveness would improve older adults’ performance in spite of their more profound name-retrieval deficits. The advantage for descriptively-named cartoon characters (measured by response accuracy and correct response onset time) was evident for both age groups, with older adults showing a larger benefit from descriptiveness than young adults.…”

“…Fogler and James (2007) explained the advantage of descriptive names, and the particular benefit conferred to older adults, within Node Structure theory (NST; MacKay, 1987; MacKay & Burke, 1990). Within the model, the key difficulty of proper names is that, unlike other types of words (e.g., common nouns; adjectives), they are not multiply connected to other propositions or lexical items.…”

“…Fogler and James (2007) suggested that when viewing the picture of a familiar descriptively-named character, semantic information representing the character’s visible and known features is activated, some of which shares identical phonology with the name (e.g., in the case of naming the Pink Panther , participants activate several large-cat names, including panther). Activation of nodes representing this semantic information transmits priming down to the lexical node that represents the desired concept, which in turn transmits priming down to phonological nodes that represent the sounds of the word.…”

Age differences in memory for names: The effect of prelearned semantic associations.

“…For example, Fogler and James (2007) found larger age differences when older and younger adults were asked to name cartoon characters with nondescriptive names (e.g.. Homer Simpson) than when those names were descriptive (e.g.. Snow White).…”