Abstract
Studies employing primed lexical decision tasks have revealed morphological facilitation effects in children and young adults. It is unknown if this effect is preserved or diminished in older adults. In fact, only few studies have investigated age-related changes in morphological processing and results are inconsistent across studies. To address this issue, we investigated morphological inflection compared to orthographic and semantic activation in young and older adults. Twenty-six adults aged 60–85 and 22 younger adults aged 19–28 participated. We probed verb recognition using a sandwich-masked primed lexical decision paradigm. We investigated perceptibility effects using different prime presentation times (33, 66 and 150 ms), and prime types with priming conditions involving orthographic (e.g., cassis – CASSE ‘blackcurrant – break’), regular inflection morphological (cassait – CASSE ‘broke – break’), and semantic primes (brise – CASSE ‘break – break’) and their controls, while measuring response accuracy and reactions times. Response accuracy analyses revealed that older participants performed at ceiling on the lexical decision task, and that accuracy level was higher compared to young adults. Reaction times data revealed effects of group (young vs. older adults), priming condition and an interaction of age group and morphological priming, but no prime presentation time effects. Both young and older adults presented a significant facilitation effect (reduced reaction times) in the orthographic and morphological priming conditions. No semantic effects were observed in either group. Younger adults also showed a significantly stronger morphological priming effect, while older adults showed no difference between orthographic and morphological priming when comparing priming magnitudes. These findings suggest (1) that regular inflectional morphological processing benefits lexical access in younger French adults, confirming studies in other languages, and (2) that this advantage is reduced at older ages.
Highlights
Additional eventrelated potential (ERP) data from this study support autonomous morphological processing, as the authors found strong and long-lasting ERP modulation for morphological priming, weak and short-lasting modulation for orthographic priming, and no effects for semantic priming. These results point to the interpretation that French speakers with ages varying from beginning readers to young adults rely on morphemic information when processing words, and that this process is distinct from orthography and semantics
We found small but significant priming effects for orthography and morphology, whereas no such effect was observed for the semantic condition
Our findings suggest that inflectional morphological priming can facilitate lexical processing in older adults, but that this effect is not the same as that observed in younger adults, as it seems to have weakened to the extent that it is numerically indistinguishable from orthographic priming
Summary
Additional ERP data from this study support autonomous morphological processing, as the authors found strong and long-lasting ERP modulation for morphological priming, weak and short-lasting modulation for orthographic priming, and no effects for semantic priming These results point to the interpretation that French speakers with ages varying from beginning readers to young adults rely on morphemic information when processing words, and that this process is distinct from orthography and semantics. On the other hand, when executive function effects are minimized using tasks that do not require explicit lexical access, such as priming paradigms with word stimuli, studies have often reported comparable performance in older, and younger participants (e.g., Lustig and Buckner, 2004) Together, these findings seem to suggest that (1) word representations are preserved in older populations and, (2) priming tasks could clarify the role of morphological representation in lexical access while minimizing the impact of other cognitive processes. We expected older adults to show globally similar patterns as younger ones since, as far as the literature shows, no impairment specific to regular inflectional morphological processing has been supported, excluding MacKay and James (2004) and Moscoso Del Prado Martín (2017)
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