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Updated: Jul 30, 2026
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Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects
Published on: November 30, 2018
Contextual effects on word production: a lifespan study.
K Roe1, J Jahn-Samilo, L Juarez
1University of California, San Diego, La Jolla 92093-0526, USA.
Memory & Cognition
|September 13, 2000
Summary
Sentence priming aids picture naming across all ages. While facilitation emerges by age 4, interference effects show developmental changes, particularly in children and older adults.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Developmental Psychology
- Psycholinguistics
Background:
- Sentence priming influences word retrieval.
- Understanding sentence context effects on language processing is crucial for developmental and cognitive psychology.
- Picture naming tasks are valuable for studying language acquisition and processing.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the impact of sentence priming on picture naming across the entire lifespan.
- To examine developmental changes in semantic facilitation and interference effects in language production.
- To assess the utility of picture naming as a tool for studying sentence context effects.
Main Methods:
- Participants aged 3 to 87 years performed a picture naming task.
- Stimuli included pictures with semantically congruent, incongruent, or neutral auditory sentence contexts.
- Analysis focused on reaction times and accuracy to measure priming effects.
Main Results:
- Sentence priming effects were observed across all age groups.
- Semantic facilitation (congruent vs. neutral) was significant by age 4 and remained stable.
- Semantic interference (incongruent vs. neutral) was present at all ages, with notable changes in young children and the oldest adults.
Conclusions:
- Picture naming effectively reveals sentence priming effects throughout the lifespan.
- Developmental trajectories exist for how sentence context influences word retrieval.
- This research highlights age-related variations in the processing of semantic relationships during language production.
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