AUDITORY REPETITION PRIMING
235
which may in turn ameliorate the uptake of sensory infor-
mation in olderadults, producingthe voice-specific prim-
ing effects reported by Sommers.
Although age-related declines in the uptake of sensory
information appear to be the likely culprit for the ab-
sence of voice-specific priming in the elderly adults of Chiarello, C., & Hoyer, W. J. (1988). Adult age differences in im-
older adults, and individuals with senile dementia of the Alzheimer
type. Journal of Memory & Language, 32, 573-592.
Balota, D. A., & Ferraro,R. (1996). Lexical, sublexical, and implicit
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and in individuals with dementia of the Alzheimer type. Neuropsy-
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plicit and explicit memory: Time course and encoding effects. Psy-
chology & Aging, 3, 358-366.
Church,B. A., & Schacter,D. L. (1994). Perceptual specificity of au-
ditory priming: Implicit memory for voice intonation and fundamen-
tal frequency. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Mem-
ory, & Cognition, 20, 521-533.
Cohen, B. H. (2001). Explainingpsychologicalstatistics (2nd ed.). New
York: Wiley.
Craik, F. I. M., Moscovitch, M., & McDowd, J. M. (1994). Contri-
butionsof surface and conceptual information to performance on im-
plicit and explicit memory tasks. Journal of Experimental Psychol-
ogy: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 20, 864-875.
Davis, H. P., Cohen, A., Gandy, M., Colombo, P., VanDussel-
dorp, G., Simolke, N., & Romano, J. (1990). Lexical priming defi-
cits as a function of age. Behavioral Neuroscience, 104, 288-297.
Experiment 2, we found no direct evidence that elderly
adults’ lower hearing acuitycouldaccountfor this finding
(
see also Schacter et al., 1994). There are, however, sev-
eral other factors (e.g., slowing, and declinesin frequency,
temporal, and intensity discrimination; see Florentine
et al., 1993; Konig, 1957; Moore et al., 1992; Schneider,
1
997; Stine et al., 1986), which, independently of losses
in pure-tone sensitivity, can limit and/or disrupt the uptake
of sensory information in old age. Thus, these factors,
rather than hearing acuity, may directly affect the process-
ing of fine-grained perceptual information and, as a result,
accountfor the absence of voice-specificpriming in the el-
derly adults of Experiment 2. Of course, one may ask Fleischman, D. A., & Gabrieli,J. D. E. (1998). Repetition priming in
normal aging and Alzheimer’s disease: A review of findingsand the-
ories. Psychology & Aging, 13, 88-119.
Florentine, M., Reed, C. M., Rabinowitz, W. M., Braida, L. D.,
whether age-related declines in the uptake of sensory in-
formation lead older adults to adopt a mode of processing
for word items that discards fine-grainedperceptual details
and places a premium on linguistic information. In Exper-
iment 1, as in the Light et al. (1992) study, we found no ev-
idence of age differences in abstract priming. In these ex-
periments, however, the magnitudeof abstract primingwas
quite modest. Thus, it is possible that other stimulus mate-
rials and/or implicit tasks may uncover some evidence of
increasedreliance on abstract word informationintheaged.
With respect to explicit memory, our findings indicate
that elderlyadultsare less efficient at recollectingbothlex-
ical and perceptual information, even though perceptual
Durlach, N. I., & Buus, S. (1993). Intensity perception: XIV. In-
tensity discrimination in listeners with sensorineural hearing loss.
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 94, 2575-2586.
Gibson, J. M., Brooks, J. O., Friedman, L., & Yesavage, J. A. (1993).
Typography manipulations can affect priming of word stem comple-
tion in older and younger adults. Psychology & Aging, 8, 481-489.
Goldinger, S. D. (1996). Words and voices: Episodic traces in spoken
word identification and recognition memory. Journal of Experimen-
tal Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 22, 1166-1183.
Goldinger,S. D. (1998). Echoes of echoes? An episodic theory of lex-
ical access. Psychological Review, 105, 251-279.
Hintzman, D. L. (1986). “Schema abstraction” in a multiple-trace
memory model. Psychological Review, 93, 411-428.
information can be a useful retrieval cue (as was demon- Hintzman, D. L., Block, R. A., & Inskeep, N. R. (1972). Memory for
mode of input. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior, 11,
strated by the young adultsof our study). In contrast to the
7
41-749.
marked age-related declines observed in the recognition
memory test of Experiment 3, we found largely intact
priming in Experiment 1, indicatingthat, in our study, im-
plicit and explicit measures could be dissociated on the
basis of age. Format changes also provided evidence of a
dissociation between implicit and explicit measures with
respect to young adults (older adults’ performance was
uniformly inferior to that of young adults across all the Jacoby, L. L., & Hayman, C. A. G. (1987). Specific visual transfer in
study conditions and item types). That is, input modality
affected both priming and recognition memory, whereas
voice only influenced priming.
Howard, D. V., Fry, A. F., & Brune, C. M. (1991). Aging and memory
for new associations: Direct versus indirect measures. Journal of Ex-
perimental Psychology:Learning,Memory, & Cognition, 17, 779-792.
Hultsch, D. F., Masson, M. E. J., & Small, B. J. (1991). Adult age dif-
ferences in direct and indirecttests of memory. Journalsof Gerontology,
4
6, P22-P30.
Jackson, A., & Morton, J. (1984). Facilitation of auditory word recog-
nition. Memory & Cognition, 12, 568-574.
word identification: Remembering without awareness. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 13, 456-
4
63.
Java, R. I., & Gardiner, J. M. (1991). Priming and aging: Further evi-
In sum, the resultsof thisstudy replicateearlier findings
of intact abstract and modality-specificpriming in old age
and provide an explanation for the contradictory findings
reported in the memory literature with respect to the pro-
dence of preserved memory function.American Journalof Psychology,
1
04, 89-100.
Karayanidis, F., Andrews, S., Ward, P. B., & McConaghy,N. (1993).
Event-related potentialsand repetition priming in young,middle-aged
and elderly normal subjects. Cognitive Brain Research, 1, 123-134.
cessing of fine-grained perceptual information in old age. Kausler,D. H., & Puckett, J. M. (1980).Adultage differences in recog-
Additional studies exploring the factors that may govern
the availability of fine-grained perceptual information in
implicit tests are needed to clarify the specific sources of
the age-related declinesuncoveredhere and in some earlier
studies.
nition memory for a nonsemantic attribute. Experimental Aging Re-
search, 6, 349-355.
Kausler,D. H., & Puckett,J. M. (1981a).Adultage differences in mem-
ory for modality attributes. Experimental Aging Research, 7, 117-125.
Kausler, D. H., & Puckett, J. M. (1981b). Adult age differences in
memory for sex of voice. Journal of Gerontology, 36, 44-50.
Kirsner, K. (1974). Modality differences in recognition memory for
words and their attributes. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 102,
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