General slowing in semantic priming and word recognition. Psychol Aging

Analyses of lexical decision studies revealed that (a) older (O) adults ' mean semantic priming effect was 1.44 times that of younger (Y) adults, (b) regression lines describing the relations between older and younger adults ' latencies in related (O = 1.54 Y-112) and unrelated conditions (O = 1.50 Y- 93) were not significantly different, and (c) that there was a proportional relation between older and younger adults ' priming effects (O = 1.48 Y- 2). Analyses of word-naming studies yielded similar results. Analyses of delayed pronunciation data (Balota & Duchek, 1988) revealed that word recog-nition was 1.47 times slower in older adults, whereas older adults ' output processes were only 1.26 times slower. Overall, analyses of whole latencies and durations of component processes provide converging evidence for a general slowing factor of approximately 1.5 for lexical information pro-cessing. During the past decade, numerous studies have focused on possible age-related deficits in semantic priming (e.g., Balota &amp