Sometimes faster, sometimes slower: associative and competitor priming in picture naming with young and elderly participants

Abstract

There are reports on facilitatory and inhibitory priming effects with semantically related prime–target pairs in naming experiments conducted with both young and elderly participants. We would suggest that facilitatory priming effects in naming occur only with associatively, non-semantically related items, whereas inhibitory priming effects occur with semantically related, non-associated items. The current experiments examined the effects of both types of primes on picture naming with young (age range: 18–25) and elderly participants (age range: 66–87). We demonstrate that associative relatedness results in short-term facilitatory priming effects and semantic relatedness results in long-term inhibitory priming effects. Age had no impact on associative facilitatory priming, and there was only limited evidence that age had an impact on the pattern of semantic inhibitory priming. We argue that at best these results are consistent with a weak form of an inhibitory deficit in older adults.