Effect of Healthy Aging and Gender on Syntactic Input Processing: A P600 Event-Related Potential Study.

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Aging

Background:

• Syntactic input processing is crucial for sentence comprehension.
• The P600 event-related potential is a key neural marker for syntactic processing.
• Understanding how aging and gender influence syntactic processing is important for cognitive neuroscience.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the impact of healthy aging and gender on syntactic input processing.
• To examine the interaction between aging and gender in sentence comprehension.
• To analyze the P600 event-related potential (ERP) in response to syntactic violations.

Main Methods:

• Sixty Dutch-speaking participants (30 males, 30 females) across three age groups.
• Electroencephalography (EEG) recording during a word order violation task.
• Analysis of P600 amplitude, latency, topography, and source localization.

Main Results:

• No age-related differences in P600 effect amplitude, latency, or topography.
• Older adults showed reduced P600 amplitude and behavioral accuracy.
• Females exhibited larger P600 amplitude and reduced behavioral accuracy compared to males.

Conclusions:

• Aging does not alter the P600 effect, but reduced behavioral accuracy in older adults suggests no functional compensation.
• Gender differences in P600 amplitude and accuracy may indicate different cognitive strategies, though not objectively confirmed by source localization.