Conscious and unconscious lexical retrieval blocking in younger and older adults

The effects of orthographically overlapping prime words in a word fragment completion task (modified from S. M. Smith & D. R. Tindell, 1997) were studied in younger and older adults. Participants studied words and then completed word fragments corresponding to those words. Fragments were preceded by a blocking, unrelated, or neutral prime. In Experiment 1, all participants were slower and less likely to complete the word fragments correctly in the blocking prime condition. Older adults also were more likely to use the blocking prime to incorrectly complete the word fragment compared with younger adults, even when warned against doing so (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 used a masked priming paradigm in younger adults to examine whether conscious processing of the prime word was necessary to produce blocking effects. Reliable blocking effects were obtained, including an intrusion rate similar to that observed in older adults in the first two experiments. These results suggest that certain aspects of word-finding failures in normal aging may be related to the reduced ability to control the activation of a lexical competitor when attempting to retrieve a target word.