Lexical competition and phonological encoding in young and older speakers
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Updated: Jul 17, 2026

Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment
Published on: June 25, 2019
Susan LaGrone1, Daniel H Spieler
1School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA. lagrone@gatech.edu
Abstract:
The influence of age on word retrieval was investigated with a speeded picture naming study. Five hundred forty-one pictures were presented to young and older adults, and the influence of name agreement and name frequency was analyzed by multiple regression. The results showed that both name agreement and name frequency are significant predictors of picture naming performance in young and older adults. The results also suggest that older adults are more strongly influenced by name agreement than are young adults. These results indicate that competition during lexical selection may be a particularly age-sensitive stage in language production.
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