The age at which a person acquires knowledge of an item is a strong predictor of item retrieval, hereon defined as the Age of Acquisition (AoA) effect. This effect is such that early-acquired words are processed more quickly and accurately than late-acquired items. One account to explain this effect is the integrated account, where the AoA effect occurs in the early processes of lexical retrieval and hence should increase in tasks necessitating greater semantic processing. Importantly, this account has been applied to lexical processing, but not, to date, memory tasks. The current study aimed to assess whether the integrated account could explain memory tasks, using compound words, which differ from monomorphemic words regarding ease of mapping and semantic processes. Four-hundred-and-eighty participants were split into four groups of 120 participants for each of four experiments. Participants were required to recall unspaced and spaced compound words (Experiments 1 and 2, respectively) or make a recognition decision for unspaced and spaced compound words (Experiments 3 and 4, respectively). This approach allowed us to establish how semantic processing was involved in recalling and recognising the items. We found that (AoA) was related to all tasks such that irrespective of space, early-acquired compound words were recalled more accurately than late-acquired compound words in free recall. In recognition memory, late-acquired compound words were recognised more accurately than early-acquired compound words. However, the slope for the AoA was semantic processing influenced free recall to a greater extent than the recognition memory, with the AoA effect being larger in free recall than recognition memory. In addition, the AoA effect for the compound word was larger in spaced compound words than unspaced compound words. This demonstrates that the AoA effect in memory has multiple sources.

一个人获得某个项目知识的年龄是项目检索的有力预测因素，在此定义为获取年龄（AoA）效应。这种效果使得早期获得的单词比晚期获得的单词处理得更快、更准确。解释这种效应的一个解释是综合解释，其中 AoA 效应发生在词汇检索的早期过程中，因此应该增加需要更多语义处理的任务。重要的是，这个帐户已应用于词汇处理，但迄今为止还没有应用于记忆任务。当前的研究旨在评估综合帐户是否可以使用复合词来解释记忆任务，复合词在映射和语义过程的易用性方面与单词素词不同。480 名参与者被分成四组，每组 120 名参与者，进行四项实验。参与者被要求回忆无间隔和间隔复合词（分别为实验1和2）或对无间隔和间隔复合词做出识别决定（分别为实验3和4）。这种方法使我们能够确定语义处理如何参与回忆和识别项目。我们发现（AoA）与所有任务相关，因此无论空间如何，在自由回忆中，早期获得的复合词比晚期获得的复合词被回忆得更准确。在识别记忆中，晚习得的复合词比早习得的复合词更准确。然而，迎角的斜率是语义处理对自由回忆的影响比识别记忆更大，其中迎角对自由回忆的影响比识别记忆更大。此外，间隔复合词的 AoA 效应比非间隔复合词更大。这表明记忆中的迎角效应有多个来源。