The influence of age of acquisition on recall and recognition in Alzheimer’s patients and healthy ageing controls in Turkish

The current study set out to examine the influence of AoA on word recall and recognition tasks in 30 Alzheimer’s patients and 28 healthy ageing control group. Each participant was presented with 20 words from Raman, Raman and Mertan (2014) norms that critically varied on AoA. A subtest of WAIS-R (Weschler, 1981; adapted into Turkish, Yılmaz, 2000) was employed to establish the vocabulary capacity of participants together with the Mini-Mental State Examination (Folstein, Folstein, and McHugh, 1975). The pattern of results showed that healthy ageing adults outperformed Alzheimer’s patients in recall and recognition tasks and that overall early acquired words had an advantage over late acquired words. The results have implications for developing assessment tools and are discussed within the current theories of age of acquisition and the impact of the neurodegenerative loss of memory in Alzheimer's disease on lexicosemantic processing

Differential effects of age of acquisition and frequency on memory: evidence from free recall of pictures and words in Turkish

The advantage of processing early acquired items over late acquired items in lexical and semantic tasks across a number of languages is well documented. Interestingly contradictory evidence has been reported in recall tasks where participants perform better overall on late acquired items compared to early acquired items in English (Dewhurst, Hitch & Barry, 1998). Moreover, free recall has also been reported to be modulated by frequency as well as list type in that studying pure lists of high frequency words or low frequency words typically leads to a recall advantage for high frequency words (Dewhurst, Brandt & Sharp, 2004). This recall advantage either disappears or is reversed when the same items are presented in mixed lists containing both high and low frequency items (Dewhurst et al, 2004). The current experiment aims to shed further light on this discrepancy by exploring the influence of AoA and frequency on free recall on standardised pictures and their names (words) in Turkish in mixed and pure lists (Raman, Raman & Mertan, 2014). Eighty participants were recruited from Yeditepe University and were assigned to either a picture (N=40) or a word condition (N=40) in which stimuli were presented in either a mixed or a pure list. Following a distracter task, participants were asked to recall as many pictures or words as they could remember from the list they viewed. The findings lend partial support to the previous findings in English and the implications are discussed within the context of current cognitive frameworks