Changes in Associative Behavior during Later Years of Life: a Cross-sectional Analysis

Word associations in old age: Evidence for consistency in semantic encoding during adulthood.

“…The results of the present study suggest that this is a critical characteristic for obtaining age constancy, and the earlier findings of age differences in response type or variability (Perlmutter, 1979;Riegel & Birren, 1966;Riegel & Riegel, 1964) may in fact reflect age differences in verbal ability.…”

“…Although both young and older adults tend to give paradigmatic responses, Riegel and Riegel (1964) reported a decrease in paradigmatic responding in old age for their sample of German-speaking adults, especially for verbs and concrete nouns. Lovelace and Cooley (1982) recently provided the only other data on paradigmatic responding in young and older adults: Vocabulary was the best predictor of paradigmatic responding, and age had no additional effect.…”

“…The stimulus words that were selected had a high frequency of occurrence (Kucera & Francis, 1967) and varied on several dimensions that influence the nature of associative responses, namely grammatical class (e.g.,Fillenbaum& Jones, 1965;Palermo, 1971),concretenessofnouns (Riegel & Riegel, 1964), and whether there is an obvious contrast word for adjectives (e.g., light-dark; Entwisle, 1966). We attempted to avoid words that are homonyms, words that could have more than one grammatical class, or words that were likely associates of other stimulus • The vocabulary subtest of the Primary Mental Abilities Test was used.…”

“…A multiple regression analysis with age, vocabulary, and years of education entered in that order showed that vocabulary was the best single predictor of paradigmatic responses, F = 5.96, p < .01, followed by education, F = 3.95, p < .01, with age making no independent contribution. Riegel and Riegel (1964) reported age differences in paradigmatic responding especially to verbs, so we examined responses to verbs further. For each verb, we compared the number of…”

The use of classification for problem solving: A comparison of middle and old age.

“…A word association study by Riegel and Riegel (1964) also indicated the same type of decline in the use of similarity classification among the elderly. Riegel and Riegel found a slight decrease in the use of paradigmatic word associations (associations in which the stimulus word and the response word are similar with respect to both meaning and grammatical class) and an increase in the use of syntagmatic word associations (associations in which the stimulus word and the response word are different with respect to meaning and grammatical class) among older people.…”