The study of inhibitory processes in aging with the Faust et al. paradigm (1997): Methodological issues

Information provided by a word activates various potential meanings. Compre hension involves the suppression of inappropriate meanings of ambiguous wor ds in order to finetune the intended meaning of sentences. IT older adult!, become less efficient at inhibiting contextually irrelevant information, t hen multiple meanings of ambiguous words would be activated regardless of c ontextual bias. An alternative to multiple access was that older adults act ivate only the most dominant meaning of ambiguous words. According to this reservation, support for an inhibition deficit would require evidence that older adults activated the multiple meanings of ambiguous words. The effect s of aging on both activation and inhibition of different meanings of ambig uous words were studied using Faust et al. (1997) paradigm. Results showed that both activation and inhibition response latency differed for the domin ant and subordinate target and that the dominant meaning fur one subject wa s not the same fur another one. The implication of these results is that st udies of inhibition should take dominance meaning of ambiguous word for eac h subject into account. (C) 2000 Academic Press.