The influence of age and sex on verbal vs visual processing of information: an experimental study

The analysis of the influence of participants' sex and age on the verbal vs visual information processing dynamics is presented. According to the dual-coding hypothesis by A. Paivio, there are two basic codes in a human's cognitive system: verbal and visual. Experimental studies carried out by A. Paivio showed that concrete nouns are connected with the visual system to a greater extent than abstract nouns. In the present article, the idea is developing that different speech and language units can be classified regarding their relation to one or the other system: it is suggested that verbs, adjectives and phrases are much more connected with the verbal system than abstract nouns. Abstract nouns, in turn, are more connected with the verbal system than concrete ones. At the same time, the problem of distinguishing abstract from concrete nouns arises. In the Russian grammar tradition, a rule exists according to which nouns may be divided into abstract and concrete by the presence or absence of a plural form; this criterion is strictly formal. In the present research, another criterion was used which is cognitive: the ability to perceive an object by one's perceptive organs. In order to prove the hypothesis of influence of subjects' sex and age on verbal vs visual coding dynamics, a chain associative experiment was carried out where images were used as stimuli. Different types of associations served as indicators of verbal vs visual coding system activity. The results showed that age affects coding differences (older participants react by a greater relative number of abstract nouns; younger participants react by a greater number of concrete nouns); the influence of sex was not found. By modeling an associative process in the course of time, the effect of an increase in the relative number of abstract nouns and decrease in the relative number of concrete nouns after the first association was discovered (this effect was found only for the group of women aged 17-20). Also a decrease in the relative number of nouns and an increase in the relative number of other reactions (non-nouns) were discovered at the same moment. These results are considered as a result of the verbal coding system activation which is caused by the task specificity (to provide verbal associations). Discovered psycholinguistic regularities are discussed in terms of general human's cognitive processes. It is proposed to carry out a chain associative experiment where stimuli are verbal in order to examine the proposed hypotheses.

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