Lexical properties of the Boston Naming Test stimuli: age differences in word naming and lexical decision latency

Two experiments examined the lexical properties of the word representations of the Boston Naming Test (BNT; Kaplan, Goodglass, & Weintraub, 1983) stimuli and whether these properties differentially influenced performance of young and older adults in a speeded word naming task and a lexical decision task. The lexical properties of the word representations examined were familiarity, number of letters, frequency of the word's occurrence, and number of syllables. The results of Experiment 1 indicated that the process of lexical access was similar in young and older adults and provided the first examination of lexical properties of the BNT stimuli in a speeded naming situation. The purpose of Experiment 2 was to reexamine the questions raised in Experiment 1 using a lexical decision task. The results of the analysis in Experiment 2 indicated that age was a significant predictor of performance on the lexical decision task. None of the other predictors contributed significantly to the regression equation.