Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

The relationship between age, processing speed, working memory capacity, and language comprehension.

Gloria Waters1, David Caplan

  • 1Boston University, Dept. of Communication Disorders, 635 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, MA 02215, USA. gwaters@bu.edu

Memory (Hove, England)
|June 15, 2005
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

Treatment-induced neural reorganization in aphasia is language-domain specific: Evidence from a large-scale fMRI study.

Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior·2023
Same author

Structural disconnections associated with language impairments in chronic post-stroke aphasia using disconnectome maps.

Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior·2022
Same author

The Role of Working Memory, Short-Term Memory, Speed of Processing, Education, and Locality in Verb-Related Morphosyntactic Production: Evidence From Greek.

Frontiers in psychology·2022
Same author

Buildout and integration of an automated high-throughput CLIA laboratory for SARS-CoV-2 testing on a large urban campus.

SLAS technology·2022
Same author

Perilesional Perfusion in Chronic Stroke-Induced Aphasia and Its Response to Behavioral Treatment Interventions.

Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.)·2022
Same author

Multimodal Neural and Behavioral Data Predict Response to Rehabilitation in Chronic Poststroke Aphasia.

Stroke·2022
Same journal

Episodic and semantic memory contributions to imagination and creativity.

Memory (Hove, England)·2026
Same journal

What is the relationship between stress and prospective memory in everyday environments?

Memory (Hove, England)·2026
Same journal

Revisiting the confidence-accuracy relationship in eyewitness identification: a metacognitive perspective.

Memory (Hove, England)·2026
Same journal

Beliefs about child witnesses: a survey of Danish legal professionals, social workers and psychologists.

Memory (Hove, England)·2026
Same journal

Potto-biographical memory ≈ autobiographical memory: on the retrieval and organisation of fictional- and personal-event memories.

Memory (Hove, England)·2026
Same journal

Conceptual and perceptual chunking of real-world objects in visual working memory.

Memory (Hove, England)·2026
See all related articles

Elderly individuals show slower processing and working memory, but their language comprehension suggests a distinct working memory system for syntax separate from general comprehension.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Neuroscience
  • Linguistics

Background:

  • Aging is associated with declines in cognitive functions like processing speed and working memory.
  • Understanding how these declines impact complex cognitive tasks, such as language comprehension, is crucial.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate age-related differences in processing speed, working memory capacity, and language processing efficiency.
  • To explore the relationship between working memory capacity and syntactic processing demands in sentence comprehension.
  • To determine if distinct working memory systems are involved in syntactic structuring versus broader language comprehension.

Main Methods:

  • Participants: 50 elderly individuals and 48 college students.
  • Measures: Processing speed, working memory capacity, on-line sentence processing efficiency (listening times), end-of-sentence acceptability judgment, paragraph comprehension.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Analysis: Correlational analyses to examine relationships between cognitive measures and language processing.

    • Main Results:

    • Elderly individuals performed significantly worse on processing speed and working memory tasks compared to college students.
    • While elderly individuals had longer overall listening times for sentences, they did not show increased listening times in high-demand syntactic regions.
    • Working memory capacity correlated with paragraph comprehension but not with syntactic processing load in demanding sentence regions.

    Conclusions:

    • The findings suggest that the working memory system supporting syntactic structuring during sentence processing may be separate from the system supporting general language comprehension.
    • Age-related declines in general working memory capacity do not necessarily impair the specific mechanisms of syntactic parsing.
    • This dissociation provides evidence for distinct neural and cognitive resources underlying different aspects of language comprehension.