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Related Experiment Videos

Age, working memory, and on-line syntactic processing in sentence comprehension.

G S Waters1, D Caplan

  • 1Department of Communication Disorders, Boston University, Massachusetts, USA. gwaters@bu.edu

Psychology and Aging
|April 17, 2001
PubMed
Summary

Older adults show reduced working memory capacity, impacting sentence processing. This study suggests language processing relies on a distinct working memory system, separate from general cognitive resources.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Neuroscience

Background:

  • Working memory capacity declines with age.
  • Sentence processing efficiency can be measured through on-line and off-line tasks.
  • Understanding age-related cognitive changes is crucial for cognitive science.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the relationship between working memory span and sentence processing efficiency in older adults.
  • To examine how age affects on-line and off-line sentence processing.
  • To test the hypothesis that language processing utilizes a domain-specific working memory system.

Main Methods:

  • 127 participants (aged 18-90) completed a reading span test and on-line/off-line sentence processing measures.
  • Working memory capacity was assessed using a reading span test.

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  • Sentence processing efficiency was evaluated using on-line and off-line measures sensitive to processing load and syntactic complexity.

    • Main Results:

    • Older participants exhibited reduced working memory spans compared to younger participants.
    • On-line measures were sensitive to processing load, while off-line measures reflected syntactic complexity.
    • Age did not significantly affect the influence of syntactic complexity on on-line processing, but showed a trend towards greater impact on off-line measures.

    Conclusions:

    • The findings support the hypothesis of a domain-specific working memory system for language processing.
    • On-line processes of linguistic form recognition and meaning determination rely on this dedicated system.
    • This system appears distinct from general working memory resources, with age-related changes potentially impacting its efficiency.