Word recognition: Age differences in contextual facilitation effects

Abstract

A series of experiments compared contextual facilitation of word recognition in old (63-80) and young (19-34) subjects. Visual word recognition was examined in a lexical decision task. Sentence contexts or no context preceded words or non-words. Both groups responded faster when context was supplied. For high predictability words, there was no age difference in the magnitude of the contextual facilitation effect. For low predictability words and non-words, the old showed greater contextual facilitation than the young. Auditory word recognition was tested with target words spoken with or without sentence context in a background of white noise. Old subjects, again, showed superior contextual facilitation. It was concluded that old people compensate for deterioration in stimulus quality by more effective use of contextual information.Much evidence has accumulated to confirm that recognition of both written and spoken words is facilitated by prior context (e.g. Miller

The Use of Contextual Information by Right Brain-Damaged Individuals in the Resolution of Ambiguous Pronouns

“…Further evidence for their use of this information was found in their sensitivity to the verb consistency factor, resulting in an effect of implicit causality. These results suggesting no age differences in the use of contextual information are consistent with a numher of studies (Cohen & Faulkner, 1983;Light & Capps, 1986;Madden, 1988) and with the emerging view that the ability to use this information and make inferences is preserved in old age when the demands placed upon working memory are nùnimal (Burke & Yee, 1984;Light et al, 1982, Light & Alhenson, 1988Light, Valencia-Laver, & Zavis, 1991;Zelinski & Miura, 1990). The following discussion is, therefore, equally applicable to both age groups.…”

Aging and self-regulated language processing.

“…There is some evidence in both speech (Cohen & Faulkner, 1983;Stine & Wingfield, 1994;Stine-Morrow, Miller, & Nevin, 1999) and reading (Madden, 1988;Speranza, Daneman, & Schneider, 2000) that older readers take differential advantage of context to decode phonology and orthography, respectively. For example, older adults shower poorer performance relative to the young in identifying isolated words, age differences that can be exacerbated by auditory or visual noise or other signal distortions (Cohen & Faulkner, 1983;Speranza et al, 2000).…”

“…For example, older adults shower poorer performance relative to the young in identifying isolated words, age differences that can be exacerbated by auditory or visual noise or other signal distortions (Cohen & Faulkner, 1983;Speranza et al, 2000). However, when these same words are embedded in context that provides semantic constraint, age differences can be greatly reduced if not eliminated (Cohen & Faulkner, 1983;Madden, 1988;Speranza et al, 2000;Stine-Morrow et al, 1999;Stine & Wingfield, 1994). Older adults may also develop compensatory strategies for reading that offset effects of slowed rates of information processing on reading speed (e.g., older typists look farther ahead during text transcription to maintain typing speed; Bosman, 1993;Salthouse, 1984).…”

Aging and word finding: Reverse vocabulary and Cloze tests

“…This Cloze procedure is similar to that in sentence completion studies by Cohen and Faulkner (1983) and Nebes, Boller, and Holland (1986), and it leads to the same general conclusion: that the aged are able to use the running context of a sentence to generate missing words with about the same facility as young adults.…”