This study tests the hypothesis that retrieval of object and
action names declines at different rates with age. Uncued and
cued performance on the Boston Naming Test (BNT) and the Action
Naming Test (ANT) were examined for 171 individuals from 50
to 88 years old. To control for differences in item difficulty,
a subset of items from each of the two tests was selected for
which uncued performance was equivalent in individuals in their
50s. With this matched set of items, differences in action and
object naming were tested in the 60s and 70+ age groups. Although
age-related decline in name retrieval was observed for both
the BNT and the ANT subsets, no differences between object and
action retrieval were found. Our results, thus, do not confirm
previous studies reporting that object names and action names
are differentially retrieved with aging. We discuss these new
findings in relation to evidence of dissociations in object
and action naming in brain-damaged individuals. (JINS,
2002, 8, 764–770.)