Age and semantic inhibition in word retrieval

An experiment to identify the source of age-related inhibition by semantically related primes in a word-retrieval paradigm is reported. Stimuli were definitions of target words, and responses were names of the target words that were defined. It has been shown previously that in this paradigm older adults are differentially inhibited by semantically related primes (Bowles & Poon, 1985a). The present experiment was designed to test the hypothesis that the additional inhibition by semantically related primes resulted from a decision strategy adopted by older adults when the primes themselves were sometimes correct target words. When the correct prime condition was eliminated in the present experiment, response times were statistically the same for semantically related and unrelated conditions for both older and younger adults. This suggests that the inhibition was due to additional decision processing performed by older adults rather than to longer retrieval processing in the presence of semantically related primes.