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 …