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Updated: Jul 15, 2026
11:01
Examining the Characteristics of Episodic Memory using Event-related Potentials in Patients with Alzheimer's Disease
Published on: August 30, 2011
Syntactic processing with aging: an event-related potential study
Laura Kemmer1, Seana Coulson, Esmeralda De Ochoa
1Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093-0515, USA. lkemmer@cogsci.ucsd.edu
Psychophysiology
|April 23, 2004
Summary
Normal aging does not affect the brain
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Aging
Background:
- Syntactic processing is crucial for language comprehension.
- Understanding age-related changes in cognitive functions like language processing is important.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how normal aging affects simple syntactic processing.
- To examine age-related changes in the brain's response to grammatical number violations.
Main Methods:
- Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were analyzed.
- Participants read sentences with grammatical number violations.
- P600 component amplitude, latency, and scalp distribution were measured across age groups.
Main Results:
- Grammatical number violations elicited a P600 with consistent amplitude and latency across ages.
- Older adults showed a less asymmetric and more frontal P600 distribution compared to younger adults.
- Age influenced the scalp distribution of the P600, not its core processing speed or amplitude.
Conclusions:
- Simple syntactic processing, specifically the P600 response to number violations, is preserved in normal aging.
- Age-related changes in syntactic processing are qualitative, involving altered brain region engagement and scalp distribution, rather than quantitative declines in speed or amplitude.
- This suggests neural reorganization rather than degradation in language processing with age.
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