Why do semantic priming effects increase in old age? A meta-analysis.

This study reports a meta-analysis comparing the size of semantic priming effects on young and older adults' lexical decision and pronunciation latency. The analysis included 15 studies with 49 conditions varying the semantic relatedness of a prime stimulus (single word or whole sentence) and a target word. An effect-size analysis on the difference between young and older adults' semantic priming effect (unrelated minus related latency) indicated that semantic priming effects are reliably larger for older than for young adults. There was no evidence for nonhomogeneity in this age difference across the different conditions. The relationship between young and older adults' semantic priming effects was described by a function with a positive intercept and a slope of 1.0. This pattern of findings favors aging models postulating process-specific slowing rather than general cognitive slowing.