Effects of age of acquisition, age, and repetition priming on object naming

The effects of age of acquisition (AoA) and long-term repetition priming on object naming times were studied in young (20- to 33-year-old) and old (80- to 95-year-old) adults. In the first stage of the experiment, participants performed one of three priming tasks: Picture naming, word reading, or lexical decision. There was an AoA effect in all tasks (although it was not reliable for word reading) that did not differ reliably for old and young participants. In the second stage of the experiment, all participants named pictures. The repetition priming effect was large from the prior naming of the same pictures, less from reading aloud the object names, and was not reliable from making lexical decisions to the object names. There was a reliable AoA effect on naming times that did not differ reliably for old and young participants (and, indeed, was actually slightly larger for the older participants). The results offer no support for the cumulative frequency hypothesis and suggest that the accessibility of words for spoken production is determined by when a word is acquired and remains broadly fixed throughout life.