Category Norms as a Function of Culture and Age: Comparisons of Item Responses to 105 Categories by American and Chinese Adults

Understanding how aging influences cognition across different cultures has been hindered by a lack of standardized, cross-referenced verbal stimuli. This study introduces a database of such item-level stimuli for both younger and older adults, in China and the United States, and makes 3 distinct contributions. First, the authors specify which item categories generalize across age and/or cultural groups, rigorously quantifying differences among them. Second, they introduce novel, powerful methods to measure between-group differences in freely generated ranked data, the rank-ordered logit model and Hellinger Affinity. Finally, a broad archive of tested, cross-linguistic stimuli is now freely available to researchers: data, similarity measures, and all stimulus materials for 105 categories and 4 culture-by-age groups, comprising over 10,000 fully translated unique item responses. The past decade has seen a marked increase in cross-cultural research in both cognitive and social psychology. Differences in cognitive and reasoning processes prevalent in Eastern and Western cultures have emerged as a topic of particular interest (e. More recently, researchers have emphasized how investigations into the interplay between aging and cultural differences in cognitive processes—particularly so between East Asian and Western cultures— can help distinguish the aspects of cognitive aging that are culturally invariant from those that depend on culture (Park, Nisbett, & Hedden, 1999). Research on cross-cultural and age differences in cognition, however, has been hampered by the lack of appropriate normed verbal materials. Given the time-consuming and costly nature of conducting norming studies, it is unsurprising that the availability of norms is limited. With respect to category norms comparing younger and older adult groups within a culture, the limited availability is further attributable to a general assumption among researchers that semantic categories remain relatively unaffected by normal aging, that is, that the structure of semantic categories does not qualitatively vary as individuals age. That semantic knowledge remains constant across the lifespan appears to be inferred primarily from two sources. First, researchers have documented a lack of age-related declines in performance on standard vocabulary tests (e.g., Salthouse, 1993); in fact, many studies have reported improvement in vocabulary scores with age (see Kausler, 1991, for a review). Second, notwithstanding the slower responses typically observed with aging (e.g., Birren & Fisher, 1995), results of semantic priming studies indicate that facilitative priming effects do not degrade across the lifespan On the one hand, it stands to reason that knowledge representations of common categories (e.g., type of fruit) remain intact if …