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Updated: Aug 20, 2026

An Experimental Paradigm for Measuring the Effects of Ageing on Sentence Processing
Published on: October 25, 2019
The relationship between age, verbal working memory, and language comprehension
Gayle DeDe1, David Caplan, Karen Kemtes
1Communication Disorders Program, Department of Health Sciences, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA.
Abstract:
A structural modeling approach was used to examine the relationships between age, verbal working memory (vWM), and 3 types of language measures: online syntactic processing, sentence comprehension, and text comprehension. The best-fit model for the online-processing measure revealed a direct effect of age on online sentence processing, but no effect mediated through vWM. The best-fit models for sentence and text comprehension included an effect of age mediated through vWM and no direct effect of age. These results indicate that the relationship among age, vWM, and comprehension differs depending on the measure of language processing and support the view that individual differences in vWM do not affect individuals' online syntactic processing.
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