Rapid automatized naming (RAN): effects of aging on a predictor of reading skill

Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN), a task in which participants must name a series of items as rapidly as possible, has been very useful as a measure of cognitive abilities that predict reading skill both in children and in young adults (YAs). This study examined RAN performance of 100 YAs and 80 cognitively healthy older adults (OAs). RAN performance was highly reliable but showed only a few weak correlations to other measures of individual differences used to study cognitive aging. RAN performance did not differ significantly by age group for symbolic RANs but was significantly slower for OAs than YAs for non-symbolic RANs. This pattern suggests that healthy aging is associated with little to no decline in the ability to sustain overlapping encoding and production of a sequence of items when it involves the form-to-form mapping required by symbolic RANs but with measurable decline in that ability when it involves the concept-to-form mapping required by non-symbolic RANs.