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.
Using the speeded word fragment completion task to examine semantic priming
