The Role of Naming Probe and Cue Type: Can They Compensate for Age-related Changes in Lexical Retrieval?

There is ample evidence of negative age-related changes in lexical retrieval, which are reflected in longer times needed to remember words and even failures to retrieve them. However, the question of whether and how these changes can be mitigated remains only marginally addressed. The present paper combined referential and inferential naming tasks and two types of cueing in order to study their possible compensatory effects for age-related changes in lexical retrieval. Referential and inferential naming tasks were combined to test if referential and inferential prelexical processes of word retrieval are equally affected by age. Letter cues and a novel type of collocational cues were implemented in order to compare their efficiency across naming tasks and ages. The experiment consisted of picture naming (referential retrieval) and naming from definition (inferential retrieval) in cued and non-cued conditions. The participants were 18 younger and 18 older healthy speakers of Russian. Analysis of reaction times and an additional analysis of accuracy rates was conducted using linear and generalized linear mixed-effect models respectively. The results revealed no interaction between naming task and age, meaning that referential and inferential naming abilities are similarly affected by age. Thus, there seems to be no compensatory effect in reliance on visual or verbal semantic information in lexical retrieval. The results also showed a main positive effect of letter cues on reaction times and accuracy rates, which was universal across tasks and ages. Collocational cues were found to impede participants’ performance in terms of reaction times. However, collocational cueing assisted in correct word retrieval in the inferential task. The results suggest that additional phonological information is helpful in lexical retrieval regardless of the way the concept is triggered. Additional contextual information about a word appears to be helpful only in its inferential retrieval. Sensitivity to these types of effective cueing is preserved in healthy aging.