Age, working memory, and on-line syntactic processing in sentence comprehension.
One hundred twenty-seven individuals who ranged in age from 18 to 90 years were tested on a reading span test and on measures of on-line and off-line sentence processing efficiency. Older participants had reduced working-memory spans compared with younger participants. The on-line measures were sensitive to local increases in processing load, and the off-line measures were sensitive to the syntactic complexity of the sentences. Older and younger participants showed similar effects of syntactic complexity on the on-line measures. There was some evidence that older participants were more affected than younger participants by syntactic complexity on the off-line measures. The results support the hypothesis that on-line processes involved in recognizing linguistic forms and determining the literal, preferred, discourse-coherent meaning of sentences constitute a domain of language processing that relies on its own processing resource or working-memory system.
Waters
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GS
Department of Communication Disorders, Boston University, Massachusetts, USA. gwaters@bu.edu
Caplan
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D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D011939:Mental Recall; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D013060:Speech; D014705:Verbal Behavior