title: Age-related Decline in Case-Marker Processing and its Relation to Working Memory Capacity.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Purposes of the current study were to investigate whether age-related decline emerged in a case-marker assignment task (CMAT) and to explore the relationship between working-memory (WM) capacity and case-marker processing.
  
  
  METHODS
  A total of 121 individuals participated in the study with 62 younger adults and 59 elderly adults. All were administered a CMAT that consisted of active and passive constructions with canonical and noncanonical word-order conditions. A composite measure of WM tasks served as an index of participants' WM capacity.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The older group performed worse than the younger group, and the noncanonical word order elicited worse performance than the canonical condition. The older group demonstrated greater difficulty in case-marker processing under the canonical condition and passive construction. Regression results revealed that age, education, and sentence type were the best predictors to account for performance on the CMAT.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The canonicity of word order and passive construction were critical factors related to decline in abilities in a case-marker assignment. The combination of age, education, and sentence type factors accounted for overall performance on case-marker processing. Results indicated the crucial necessity to find a cognitively and linguistically demanding condition that elicits aging effects most efficiently, considering language-specific syntactic features.
authors.affiliation: Department of Communication Disorders, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea.
authors.forename: Jee Eun
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Sung
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000066492:Cognitive Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D032882:Comprehension; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D007723:Korea; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D008875:Middle Aged; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Aging; Canonicity of word order; Case-marker processing; Syntactic complexity; Working memory capacity