Search for semantic inhibition failure during sentence comprehension by younger and older adults

The present research examined recent evidence that inhibition failures do not contribute to age-related declines in on-line text comprehension. Evaluating naming performance over a time course revealed that processes serving to eliminate thematically irrelevant information from memory in young adults were apparently deficient for older adults. Experiment 2 generalized these findings to contexts that rely on later information to disambiguate ambiguous words. Under these conditions, older adults were as able as younger adults to use context to disambiguate words. Despite the apparent disagreement between the experimental outcomes, it is argued that the present studies together are consistent and support the view that inhibition failures unlikely contribute to age differences in on-line sentence comprehension (at least) when the contexts are semantically constraining (i.e., self-contained). It is proposed that the detection of age-related inhibition failures may depend on the extent to which adults must rely on internally generated processing constraints.