中文摘要：

通过3个实验,探讨干扰抑制在言语产生老化中的作用。实验1采用经典Stroop任务,发现老年人在高水平的、自动的语义激活时产生了更大的抑制困难。实验2操纵潜在竞争词的语义激活水平,发现在潜在竞争词处于低水平的语义激活时,老年人的抑制能力与年轻人相当;在潜在竞争词处于高水平的语义激活时,老年人表现出抑制能力的劣势。实验3采用造句任务,发现老年人在抑制角色冲突时存在着较大的困难,老年人在顺序不一致的条件下的造句成绩显著差于年轻人。整个研究表明,老年人在言语产生中的抑制能力差于年轻人,但抑制老化效应受潜在干扰刺激的激活水平影响。

英文摘要：

As the development and acceleration of world population aging process, people pay more attention to the aging of cognitive function. As one of the basic cognitive function, speech processing has been widely discussed and evidence showed that the ability of speech comprehension preserved well throughout life while the ability of speech production decline. Why do these happen？ In some research, aging people showed disadvantages on fulfilling tasks that involved competitions. It seems that changing of inhibiting capacity can be the plausible and essential reason. However, we don’t believe it should be the only reason. Three experiments investigated the inhibition deficit hypothesis in the aging of speech production across different tasks. In Experiment 1, Stroop effect was tested between the elderly and the young. Results showed that the elderly have greater difficulty in producing the right words than young when semantic information of the given words was not consistent with its printed color （i.e., word “RED” was written in red）. Elderly seems to have greater disadvantages than young in inhibiting automatic activation of semantics. In Experiment 2, manipulating the context to the given targets, potential competitors were activated at different levels： high or low. Results turned out that the ability to inhibit the potential word of the elderly was equivalent to the young at the low activation level （experiment 2a）, while the elderly appeared to have inferior inhibition ability at the high activation level （experiment 2b）. We believed that the inhibitory deficit does not always happen to elderly.Activation levels of potential competitors plays important role in speech. For more evidence, we used sentence production task in Experiment 3, and investigated the above assumption in sentence level. The results showed that there were greater difficulties in inhibiting the confliction between pictures’ roles for the elderly, and the performance of sentence production was significantly worse with t