The time course of automatic lexical access and aging

Catherine Stern, Penny Prather, David Swinney, Edgar Zurif
1991 Brain and Language  
This study addresses the issue of cognitive slowing in the elderly by examining the time course of automatic lexical access. College-aged subjects typically show a brief rise time (300-500 msec) for lexical access. In the present study, we examine whether there are changes in rapid, automatized access routines with age. Elderly and college-aged subjects performed a lexical decision task wherein semantically related words embedded in a continuous list were presented one at a time with a varying
more » ... 300-1500 msec) inter-word interval. The use of a continuous list, a repeated word, and a very short inter-stimulus interval allowed automatic lexical access to be straightforwardly examined. The elderly subjects showed an onset of automatic lexical access that was similar in time frame to that for college-age subjects. These findings suggest that wherever the locus of age-related slowing The research reported in this paper was supported in part by NIH Grants NS21806 to Brandeis University and D000102 and NS06209 to
doi:10.1016/0093-934x(91)90135-n pmid:2054592 fatcat:lphnjzntmbdyhmkbqfh6tkmhg4