Exploring how aging affect our ability to deal with lexico-semantic ambiguity through automatic or voluntary tasks : the role of activation/selection and selection/interference

Two Selection processes intervein when managing lexico-semantic ambiguity; activation/selection (when dealing with Homonyms and their -Dominant (HD; e.g. right-correct) or -Subordinate (HS; e.g. right-direction) meaning); and selection/interference (if ambiguity comes from interfering foils). Assuming that aging would affect selection/interference but not activation/selection, we combined two tasks (automatic and voluntary) using the same homonyms with 30 young and 50 elderly participants, all healthy. They performed a primed lexical decision task[1] (PLD) with HD, HS, or non-related (NR) primers and a task of words association[2] (on global meaning (HD/HS) or common feature) among interfering foils. For elderly, HD/HS conditions influenced activation/selection in the PLD but not in association task while interfering foils impacted performances across all conditions, showing a general difficulty in using selection/interference. This confirms the preserved activation/selection and affected selection/interference in aging and questions the hypothesis that voluntary dealing the lexico-semantic ambiguity implicates more aging-sensitive executive functions.