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An Experimental Paradigm for Measuring the Effects of Ageing on Sentence Processing
Published on: October 25, 2019
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Effects of Aging on Interference During Pronoun Resolution
Jana Reifegerste1, Claudia Felser1
1Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism, University of Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany.
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research : JSLHR
|December 10, 2017
Summary
Healthy aging affects pronoun resolution. Older adults struggle with grammatical rules when reading complex sentences, unlike younger adults, indicating age-related changes in language processing.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Developmental Psychology
Background:
- Pronoun resolution is crucial for language comprehension.
- Understanding how aging impacts language processing is vital.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how healthy aging affects the ability to suppress grammatically incorrect antecedents during pronoun resolution.
- To examine age-related differences in sensitivity to grammatical features in pronoun resolution.
Main Methods:
- Two reading-based experiments using German speakers (younger and older adults).
- A gender-mismatch paradigm to assess sensitivity to pronoun-antecedent agreement.
- Self-paced reading and word-by-word presentation to manipulate processing demands.
Main Results:
- Older adults showed greater sensitivity to mismatches under low processing load.
- Under increased processing load, older adults exhibited reduced sensitivity and were more distracted by illicit antecedents.
- Younger adults consistently demonstrated sensitivity to grammatical constraints.
Conclusions:
- The ability to resolve pronoun references and manage interference is vulnerable to increased task demands in older adults.
- Executive functions, like interference control, may play a role in age-related differences in language processing.
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