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Updated: May 24, 2026

An Experimental Paradigm for Measuring the Effects of Ageing on Sentence Processing
Published on: October 25, 2019
Online grammaticality judgments in French young and older adults
Michèle Kail1, Patrick Lemaire, Mireille Lecacheur
1Department of Cognitive Psychology, Aix-Marseille University and CNRS, Marseille, France. kail.michele@wanadoo.fr
Unlabelled:
BACKGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT: A goal of language and aging research is to determine the nature of change in language-processing skills. In this study the authors examine the role of age and use of cues (e.g., word order, verbal agreement, sentence structure) on online sentence processing.
Methods:
French young and older adults were asked to detect grammatical violations in sentences as quickly as possible. Detection times were analyzed as a function of participants' age and sentence characteristics (i.e., violation type, span, and position).
Results:
Above and beyond main effects of participant's age and linguistic features, results showed age-related differences in effects of linguistic cues on sentence processing and important individual differences during aging in hierarchies of cue strength.
Conclusion:
Young and older adults use similar linguistic cues in the online process, but loss of cognitive resources with age shows a cost of cue use and a greater use of context.
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