Effect of schooling in auditory lexical decision

The task of lexical decision demands the functioning of the phonological loop to identify and discriminate strings of sounds and lexical knowledge to identify if this string can be taken as a real word or pseudo-word.

To verify the effect of schooling on the performance of healthy elderly in lexical decision tasks, in the auditory modality.

23 Participants, aged sixty years or older were divided into two groups: 1-8 years and greater than 8 years of schooling. The PALPA lexical decision subtest containing words and pseudo-words was applied.

There was no significant difference between the groups in identifying words and pseudo-words. Errors in pseudo-words predominated in both groups. Total scoring of the groups differed with worse performance in the group with less schooling. There was a tendency toward statistically significant difference. The errors in words occurred predominantly in words of low-imageability, especially in the lower educated group. In this group, there was a positive correlation between schooling and errors in pseudo-words.

There was a mild effect of schooling in this task. Studies on lexical decision with larger samples could offer an important contribution for estimating pre-morbid skills and contribute to understanding pathological conditions.