Inhibitory control of disconfirmed predictions during sentence processing in aging

Extensive research shows that younger adults actively predict upcoming words during sentence comprehension. When these predictions are incorrect (e.g., "On sunny days, Jake visits the park to walk his monkey"), younger adults engage inhibitory control to suppress the initially predicted word (e.g., "dog"). However, relatively little is known about how older adults handle incorrect predictions. This question is critical because older adults often show deficits in domain-general inhibition as a result of cognitive aging. Here, we examined whether older adults engage inhibitory control to suppress initially predicted words when those predictions prove incorrect, and whether domain-general abilities modulate this process. Fifty-two younger adults and forty-nine older adults completed a cross-modal lexical priming task to assess inhibitory control during sentence processing, along with a stop-signal task, indexing non-linguistic inhibitory control (motor inhibition). We predicted that if stop-signal performance modulates inhibitory control during sentence processing, this would reflect domain-general inhibition. Results indicated that older adults effectively engaged in inhibitory processing, similar to younger adults, when predictions were disconfirmed. Moreover, our results raise the possibility that domain-general processes are involved in inhibitory control during sentence processing in both groups. These findings enhance our understanding of how predictive mechanisms and inhibitory control function across age groups, highlighting both preserved abilities and the impact of individual variability.