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Investigating the Effect of Stimulus Variables on Naming Performance in Younger and Older Adults

Abhishek B. P., Malavi Srikar, Reny Raju

Abstract


The mental lexicon is a composite of systematically organized lexical entries of an individual’s vocabulary. The activation and retrieval of these lexical entries for a target stimulus is termed as lexical access. Naming paradigm experiments have been employed to tap lexical access, with picture naming tasks being the most common. Various subject (participant) and stimulus related parameters have been investigated and identified to influence the naming latencies. The influence of these parameters has been studied in individual studies. However, limited literature exists regarding the combined effect of these parameters on naming latencies. Hence, the current study aims to investigate the influence of the combined effect of stimulus parameters (word frequency-frequent/infrequent and word length-long/short) on a participant parameter (age). A total of 40 participants (20 young adults and 20 older adults) were recruited for the study. A picture naming task was administered with two sets of stimuli, varying in both word frequency and word length. The mean reaction times and the accuracy scores were obtained for both the groups. The results indicated that both the groups demonstrated greater difficulties in naming longer (polysyllabic) as compared to shorter (bisyllabic) words, especially those of lower frequency of occurrence. However, a significant difference was only obtained for the older adults. As evidenced by existing literature, this study also revealed that the performance of the younger adults was superior to that of the older adults Older adults experienced more difficulties in naming longer infrequent words.

Keywords: Naming, frequency effect, word length effect

Keywords


Naming, frequency effect, word length effect

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References


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DOI: https://doi.org/10.37628/ijbme.v3i2.506

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