title: Typography manipulations can affect priming of word stem completion in older and younger adults.
abstract: The experiments reported here investigated whether changes of typography affected priming of word stem completion performance in older and younger adults. Across all experiments, the typeface in which a word appeared at presentation either did or did not match that of its 3-letter stem at test. In Experiment 1, no significant evidence of a typography effect was found when words were presented with a sentence judgment or letter judgment task. However, subsequent experiments revealed that, in both older and younger adults, only words presented with a syllable judgment task gave rise to the typography effect (Experiments 2-4). Specifically, performance was greater, when the presentation and test typeface matched than when they did not. Experiment 5, which used stem-cued recall, did not reveal a difference between syllable and letter judgment tasks. These findings highlight the complex nature of word stem completion performance.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Grinnell College, Iowa 50112.
authors.forename: J M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Gibson
authors.forename: J O
authors.initials: JO
authors.lastname: Brooks
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Friedman
authors.forename: J A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Yesavage
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D007802:Language; D007807:Language Tests; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D008875:Middle Aged; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D014825:Vocabulary