DO CHILDREN AND THE ELDERLY SHOW HEIGHTENED SEMANTIC PRIMING - HOW TOANSWER THE QUESTION

''Semantic priming'' has two meanings, one an internal activation and the other a performance difference between responses to primed and unp rimed stimuli. Individual and group differences in the performance dif ference score are heavily influenced by overall speed and/or accuracy and so are a flawed reflection of internal activation. These relations hips obscure the meaning of many published findings of greater than no rmal priming difference scores in special groups, such as children and the elderly. Meaningful comparison of groups on the activation underl ying priming difference scores requires removing the effects of overal l performance level. We discuss ways of doing so. We make this argumen t in the context of semantic priming research but it applies equally t o other paradigms that use difference scores for the comparison of gro ups of differing performance levels. (C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.