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Charlie Brown Versus Snow White: The Effects of Descriptiveness on Young and Older Adults' Retrieval of Proper Names

Department of Psychology, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

Address correspondence to Lori James, Psychology Department, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, CO 80933-7150. E-mail: ljames{at}uccs.edu

The nondescriptive nature of proper names has been suggested as one reason that people experience particular difficulty learning and recalling names. This experiment tested whether the exacerbated difficulty experienced by older adults in retrieving proper names is partly due to names' nondescriptive quality. Young and older participants named pictures of well-known cartoon characters that have either descriptive names (e.g., Snow White, Big Bird) or nondescriptive names (e.g., Charlie Brown, Garfield). Older adults were particularly impaired at retrieving nondescriptive names. Results indicate that theories of name memory must represent the nondescriptive nature of names and account for the decreased retrieval difficulty for descriptive compared with nondescriptive names in aging.