Semantic diversity in paired-associate learning: Further evidence for the information accumulation perspective of cognitive aging.

Abstract

Normal aging is often associated with a performance decline on various cognitive tests, including paired associate learning (PAL), where participants are asked to learn and recall arbitrary word pairs. While many studies have taken this as evidence to support the notion of age-related deficits in cognitive processing, Ramscar, Hendrix, Shaoul, Milin, and Baayen (Topics in Cognitive Science, 6(1), 5-42) and Ramscar, Sun, Hendrix, and Baayen (Psychological Science, 28(8), 1171-1179, 2017) posit that the decline in performance on various cognitive tasks can be explained by the accumulation of linguistic knowledge over time. To demonstrate this, Ramscar et al. (2017) found that older bilingual participants outperformed monolingual counterparts on a verbal PAL task, proposed to be due to bilinguals having accumulated less information about the words used in the study. However, comparing bilinguals to monolinguals introduces confounding factors. For example, bilingual's better performance may be due to superior executive functioning. To minimize these between-subject confounds, the current study used a within-subject design in order to examine the influence of linguistic experience on paired associate learning in younger and older adults. Linguistic experience was modeled using a semantic diversity measure of word strength (Jones, Johns, & Recchia, 2012). When frequency is controlled for, high semantic diversity words are associated to a greater number of words and have a higher average strength of association. In the current study, PAL performance of older adults was significantly lower for word pairs involving high semantic diversity words, while their performance did not differ for low semantic diversity words, consistent with the information accumulation perspective of aging.