Spataro, P. 1 , Rossi-Arnaud, C. 2 & Mulligan, N. 3
1 Sapienza University, Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology
2 Sapienza University, Department of Psychology
3 University of North Carolina, Department of Psychology
The present study examined the effects of subjective age of acquisition (AoA) in two different tasks of implicit memory that are heavily based on the retrieval of visual-orthographic information. The rationale is that, having established where priming effects are located, the assessment of the interaction with psycholinguistic variables like AoA may allow one to determine if their effects influence the same processing levels. Experiment 1 employed the Word-Fragment Completion task. The to-be-completed fragments were exposed for 4 sec, to reduce possible contributions from phonological and semantic processes. Results indicated that the overall percentages of correct completion were significantly greater for early- than for late-acquired words. Importantly, repetition priming interacted with AoA, such that priming was higher for late- than for early-acquired items. Experiment 2 used a modified version of the Lexical Decision task, in which non-words were represented by illegal, unpronounceable strings of letters. Data showed that decision times were significantly shorter for early- than for late-acquired words. Again, repetition priming interacted with AoA, because priming was greater for late- than for early-acquired items. These findings suggest that AoA can affect implicit memory by facilitating the retrieval of the orthographic properties of the studied words.