Old words, new meanings: Aging and sense creation

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Abstract

We assessed adult age differences in interpretations of eponymous noun phrases (e.g., do an Elvis Edmunds). In Experiment 1, young and old participants produced interpretations after reading vignettes describing three actions of fictitious eponyms. One of the actions was the intended interpretation, and cues either did or did not restrict the interpretation to that action. Although both age groups were sensitive to interpretation cues, young adults were likely to produce the intended interpretation, but older participants generalized across all actions. The results of Experiment 2 replicated this pattern under conditions in which subjects received more practice and misleading contextual information was removed. Experiment 3 tested whether older adults' tendency to generalize was due to the retrieval requirements of production by using a verification task. Older participants did not differ from the young in verifying intended interpretations but were at chance in rejecting generalizations, suggesting that older adults may have a deficit in semantic processing. © 1996 Academic Press, Inc.

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Zelinski, E. M., & Hyde, J. C. (1996). Old words, new meanings: Aging and sense creation. Journal of Memory and Language, 35(5), 689–707. https://doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1996.0036

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