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Updated: May 30, 2026

Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment
Published on: June 25, 2019
Effects of Age-of-Acquisition in the Word-Fragment Completion Task: evidence for an orthographic locus in implicit
Pietro Spataro1, Neil W Mulligan, Emiddia Longobardi
1Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, University of Rome Sapienza, Italy. pietro.spataro@uniroma1.it
Abstract:
Barry, Hirsh, Johnston, and Williams (2001) found that Age-of-Acquisition (AoA) interacted with repetition priming in the picture naming task (greater priming for late- than for early-acquired words), and proposed that AoA might affect the stage of access to lexical-phonological representations. The present experiment examined the possibility that AoA may influence the retrieval of visual-orthographic information, by studying its effects in the Word-Fragment Completion Task (WFCT). Results showed that the overall percentages of correct completion were greater for early- than for late-acquired words, while repetition priming was higher for late- than for early-acquired items. Furthermore, the interaction between AoA and WFCT priming remained significant even when the fragments were exposed for only 4 s, reducing possible contributions from phonological and semantic processes. These findings suggest that AoA can affect implicit memory by facilitating the retrieval of the orthographic properties of the studied words.
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