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Aging and Lexical Inhibition: The Effect of Orthographic Neighborhood Frequency in Young and Older Adults

Department of Psychology, Université Bordeaux 2, France.

Address correspondence to Christelle Robert, who is now at the University of Geneva, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Bd du Pont-d'Arve 40, CH-1211 Genève 4, Switzerland. E-mail: Christelle.Robert{at}pse.unige.ch

The aim of this study was to examine whether the lexical inhibition underlying orthographic neighborhood effects in visual word recognition is changed with aging. To do so, orthographic neighborhood frequency was manipulated for French words that had either no higher frequency neighbor (e.g., taupe), or at least one higher frequency neighbor (e.g., the word loupe has two higher frequency neighbors, coupe and soupe). Young adults (mean age = 20.9 years) and older adults (mean age = 67.8 years) performed a standard lexical decision task. An interaction was found between age group and orthographic neighborhood frequency on word latencies. More precisely, an inhibitory effect of neighborhood frequency was observed for the young adults but not for the older ones. These data are consistent with the assumption of an age-related decline in lexical inhibition and activation. The findings are discussed in the framework of visual word recognition and aging.