the apparent-time hypothesis has been applied in studies involving statistical analyses of semantic similarity judgements. j.p. magué performed a study with native french speakers with mean ages of 21 years and 56 years. the study measured semantic variation among the speakers to create a semantic field by analyzing the speakers' judgements of synonyms for the french word "maison" 'house'. the synonyms had a high-frequency variation between the first and second halves of the 20th century. a correlation was found between semantic variation and age, in which the older group judged the synonyms more similar than the younger group. this shows that variation in semantic representations reflect semantic change instead of an age-grading phenomenon. this would be confirmed by real-time studies.