ADULT AGE-DIFFERENCES IN LONG-TERM SEMANTIC PRIMING

Young and older adults were first asked to decide if a list of individ ually presented wards were ''living'' (e.g., ''tree'') or ''nonliving' ' (e.g., ''store''). This was termed the ''orienting task.'' Next, sub jects performed a pronunciation task. Semantic priming for young and o lder adults was indexed by determining if semantic congruence between words in the orienting task and words in the pronunciation task improv ed performance on the pronunciation task relative to pronounced words from semantic categories nor primed in the orienting task. The present data, from two different experiments, revealed that subjects pronounc ed high-dominance exemplars of the ''living'' words primed in the orie nting task faster than words not primed in the orienting task. These d ata indicated that semantic priming for relatively long prime-target s timulus onset asynchronies can occur, and that such priming is at leas t as robust for older adults as for young adults. The results are disc ussed in terms of four current models of semantic priming.