title: Effects of Age-of-Acquisition in the Word-Fragment Completion Task: evidence for an orthographic locus in implicit memory.
abstract: Barry, Hirsh, Johnston, and Williams (2001) found that Age-of-Acquisition (AoA) interacted with repetition priming in the picture naming task (greater priming for late- than for early-acquired words), and proposed that AoA might affect the stage of access to lexical-phonological representations. The present experiment examined the possibility that AoA may influence the retrieval of visual-orthographic information, by studying its effects in the Word-Fragment Completion Task (WFCT). Results showed that the overall percentages of correct completion were greater for early- than for late-acquired words, while repetition priming was higher for late- than for early-acquired items. Furthermore, the interaction between AoA and WFCT priming remained significant even when the fragments were exposed for only 4 s, reducing possible contributions from phonological and semantic processes. These findings suggest that AoA can affect implicit memory by facilitating the retrieval of the orthographic properties of the studied words.
authors.affiliation: Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, University of Rome Sapienza, Italy. pietro.spataro@uniroma1.it
authors.forename: Pietro
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Spataro
authors.forename: Neil W
authors.initials: NW
authors.lastname: Mulligan
authors.forename: Emiddia
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Longobardi
authors.forename: Clelia
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Rossi-Arnaud
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D010700:Phonetics; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011581:Psychological Tests; D060865:Repetition Priming; D012660:Semantics; D055815:Young Adult