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Updated: May 4, 2026

An Experimental Paradigm for Measuring the Effects of Ageing on Sentence Processing
Published on: October 25, 2019
Natural and constrained language production as a function of age and cognitive abilities
Cristina D Rabaglia1, Timothy A Salthouse2
1Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA.
Abstract:
Although it is often claimed that verbal abilities are relatively well maintained across the adult lifespan, certain aspects of language production have been found to exhibit cross-sectional differences and longitudinal declines. In the current project age-related differences in controlled and naturalistic elicited language production tasks were examined within the context of a reference battery of cognitive abilities in a moderately large sample of individuals aged 18-90. The results provide support for age-related increases in lexical sophistication and diversity at the discourse level, and declines in grammatical complexity in controlled and naturalistic contexts. Further, age-related decreases in facility with complex grammatical constructions in controlled sentence production were statistically independent of the cognitive abilities assessed in this project.
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