Interactive Effects of Age-of-Acquisition and Repetition Priming in the Lexical Decision Task A Multiple-Loci Account

The analysis of the interaction between repetition priming and age of acquisition may be used to shed further light on the question of which stages of elaboration are affected by this psycholinguistic variable. In the present study we applied this method in the context of two versions of a lexical decision task that differed in the type of non-words employed at test. When the non-words were illegal and unpronounceable, repetition priming was primarily based on the analysis of orthographic information, while phonological processes were additionally recruited only when using legal pronounceable non-words. The results showed a significant interaction between repetition priming and age of acquisition in both conditions, with priming being greater for late-than for early-acquired words. These findings support a multiple-loci account, indicating that age of acquisition influences implicit memory by facilitating the retrieval of both the orthographic and the phonological representations of studied words.