Differences Between Young and Older Adults in Learning A Foreign Vocabulary

The learning of new words in younger and older English-speaking adults was studied. The subjects learned lists with pairs consisting of a familiar word and a meaningless novel word. The phonological familiarity of the response items (English pseudowords vs Finnish words) and the associative value of the cue words were manipulated. Young subjects learned more items, and phonologically familiar forms and items paired with cue words with a high associative value were easier to learn. Unexpectedly, no interaction was found between age and cue word difficulty; however, the younger subjects profited more from items being phonologically familiar. Learning for both age groups correlated with a semantic learning task. Learning also correlated with a phonological working memory task (repetition of Finnish words) for the older, but not significantly for the younger subjects. A model for word learning is described suggesting that older subjects′ performance depends comparatively more on phonological working memory.