Effects of Age-of-Acquisition in the Word-Fragment Completion Task Evidence for an Orthographic Locus in Implicit Memory

Barry, Hirsh, Johnston, and Williams (2001) found that Age-of-Acquisition (AoA) interacted with repetition priming in the picture naming task (greater priming for late-than for early-acquired words), and proposed that AoA might affect the stage of access to lexical-phonological representations. The present experiment examined the possibility that AoA may influence the retrieval of visual-orthographic information, by studying its effects in the Word-Fragment Completion Task (WFCT). Results showed that the overall percentages of correct completion were greater for early-than for late-acquired words, while repetition priming was higher for late-than for early-acquired items. Furthermore, the interaction between AoA and WFCT priming remained significant even when the fragments were exposed for only 4 s, reducing possible contributions from phonological and semantic processes. These findings suggest that AoA can affect implicit memory by facilitating the retrieval of the orthographic properties of the studied words.