Effects of age, speed of processing, and working memory on comprehension of sentences with relative clauses.

Two hundred participants, 50 in each of four age ranges (19–29, 30–49, 50–69, 70–90) were tested for working memory, speed of processing, and the processing of sentences with relative clauses. In Experiment 1, participants read four sentence types (cleft subject, cleft object, subject-subject, subject-object) in a word-by-word, non-cumulative, self-paced reading task and made speeded plausibility judgments about them. In Experiment 2, participants read two types of sentences, one of which contained a doubly center embedded relative clause. Older participants' comprehension was less accurate and there was age-related slowing of online processing times in all but the simplest sentences, which increased in syntactically complex sentences in Experiment 1. This pattern suggests an age-related decrease in the efficiency of parsing and interpretation. Slower speed of processing and lower working memory were associated with longer online processing times only in Experiment 2, suggesting that task-related operations are related to general speed of processing and working memory. Lower working memory was not associated with longer reading times in more complex sentences, consistent with the view that general working memory is not critically involved in online syntactic processing. Longer online processing at the most demanding point in the most demanding sentence was associated with better comprehension, indicating that it reflects effective processing under some certain circumstances. However, the poorer comprehension performance of older individuals indicates that their slower online processing reflects inefficient processing even at these points. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Younger and older adults' on-line processing of syntactically ambiguous sentences.

Off-line studies of younger and older adults' processing of syntactically complex sentences have shown that there is a consistent negative relationship between task performance and working memory for older adults. However, it is not evident from these studies whether working memory affects the immediate syntactic analysis of a sentence, off-line processes, or both. In the current study an on-line reading paradigm was used to examine the working memory capacity-constrained sentence processing model from M. C. MacDonald, M. A. Just, and P. A. Carpenter (1992). Working memory span, type of syntactic ambiguity (ambiguous vs. unambiguous), and type of syntactic ambiguity resolution (main verb vs. relative clause) interacted to influence younger and older adults' on-line reading times and off-line sentence comprehension. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

On-line processing of written text by younger and older adults.

Word-by-word reading times were measured for young and elderly adults who read single sentences for immediate recall. The reading strategies of young and old were similar in that both groups allocated time to process word-level and constituent-level features. Young and elderly readers differed mainly in how they allocated time for organizational processing: Whereas younger adults allocated extra processing time at sentence boundaries as well as at major and minor clause boundaries, older adults allocated extra time at major and minor clause boundaries only. Results were generally consistent with the notions that processes that are more microlevel (e.g., word access) become automatic with practice and that age deficits are minimal for such processes. Age differences in organization time allocated at clause boundaries, however, suggested age-related limitations in working memory processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adult age differences in working memory.

Two experiments were conducted to determine whether adult age differences in working memory should be attributed to less efficient processing, a smaller working memory storage capacity, or both. In Experiment 1, young, middle-age, and older adults solved 3 additional problems before giving the answers to any. Older adults added as well as young and middle-age adults but showed a more pronounced serial position curve across the 3 problem positions. In Experiment 2, young and older adults constructed linear orderings (e.g., ABCD) from pairwise information presented in sentences (e.g., BC). Manipulations involving processing (e.g., type of sentence) did not interact with age differences, but those involving storage capacity (e.g., ordering length) did. All main effects and interactions support the hypothesis of a smaller storage capacity but do not rule out some processing deficit in older adults. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Eye movements of young and older adults while reading with distraction.

The authors used eye-tracking technology to examine young and older adults' online performance in the reading in distraction paradigm. Participants read target sentences and answered comprehension questions following each sentence. In some sentences, single-word distracters were presented in either italic or red font. Distracters could be related or unrelated to the target text. Online measures, including probability of fixation, fixation duration, and number of fixations to distracting text, revealed no age differences in text processing. However, young adults did have an advantage over older adults in overall reading time and text comprehension. These results provide no support for an inhibition deficit account of age differences in the reading in distraction paradigm, but are consistent with J. Dywan and W. E. Murphy's (1996) suggestion that older adults are less able than the young to distinguish target and distracter information held in working memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Converging evidence that visuospatial cognition is more age-sensitive than verbal cognition.

In 3 separate experiments, the same samples of young and older adults were tested on verbal and visuospatial processing speed tasks, verbal and visuospatial working memory tasks, and verbal and visuospatial paired-associates learning tasks. In Experiment 1, older adults were generally slower than young adults on all speeded tasks, but age-related slowing was much more pronounced on visuospatial tasks than on verbal tasks. In Experiment 2, older adults showed smaller memory spans than young adults in general, but memory for locations showed a greater age difference than memory for letters. In Experiment 3, older adults had greater difficulty learning novel information than young adults overall, but older adults showed greater deficits learning visuospatial than verbal information. Taken together, the differential deficits observed on both speeded and unspeeded tasks strongly suggest that visuospatial cognition is generally more affected by aging than verbal cognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Eye-Fixation Patterns of High- and Low-Span Young and Older Adults: Down the Garden Path and Back Again.

Young and older adults' eye fixations were monitored as they read sentences with temporary ambiguities such as "The experienced soldiers warned about the dangers conducted the midnight raid." Their fixation patterns were similar except that older adults made many regressions. In a 2nd experiment, high- and low-span older adults were compared with high- and low-span young adults. Pint-pass fixations were similar, except low-span readers made many regressions and their total fixation times were longer. High-span readers also used the focus operator "only" (e.g., "Only experienced soldiers warned about the dangers . . .") to immediately resolve the temporary ambiguities. No age group differences were observed. These results are discussed with reference to theories of the role of working memory in sentence processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Experimentally disentangling what's beneficial about elderspeak from what's not.

Three studies evaluated different varieties of elderspeak using a referential communication task. Experiment 1 compared the effects of syntactic simplifications and semantic elaborations. Experiment 2 contrasted syntactic simplifications and prosodic exaggerations. Experiment 3 contrasted 2 different syntactic simplification strategies and 2 different prosodic exaggerations. Providing semantic elaborations and reducing the use of subordinate and embedded clauses benefit older adults and improve their performance on the referential communication task, whereas reducing sentence length, slowing speaking rate, and using high pitch do not. The use of short sentences, a slow rate of speaking, and high pitch resulted in older adults' reporting more communication problems. These experiments validate a version of elderspeak that benefits older adults without sounding patronizing and insulting. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Encoding and memory for visible speech and gestures: A comparison between young and older adults.

Two experiments explored whether older adults have developed a strategy of compensating for slower speeds of language processing and hearing loss by relying more on the visual modality. Experiment 1 examined the influence of visual articulatory movements of the face (visible speech) in auditory–visual syllable classification in young adults and older adults. Older adults showed a significantly greater influence of visible speech. Experiment 2 examined immediate recall in three spoken-language sentence conditions: speech alone, with visible speech, or with both visible speech and iconic gestures. Sentences also varied in meaningfulness and speech rate. In the old adult group, recall was better for sentences containing visible speech compared with the speech-alone sentences in the meaningful sentence condition. Old adults' recall showed no overall benefit of the presence of gestures. Young adults' recall on meaningful sentences was not higher for the visible speech compared with the speech-alone condition, whereas recall was significantly higher with the addition of iconic gestures. In the anomalous sentence condition, both young and old adults showed an advantage in recall by the presence of visible speech.… (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The parser doesn't ignore intransitivity, after all.

Several previous studies (B. C. Adams, C. Clifton, & D. C. Mitchell, 1998; D. C. Mitchell, 1987; R. P. G. van Gompel & M. J. Pickering, 2001) have explored the question of whether the parser initially analyzes a noun phrase that follows an intransitive verb as the verb's direct object. Three eye-tracking experiments examined this issue in more detail. Experiment 1 replicated the finding that readers experience difficulty on this noun phrase in normal reading and found that this difficulty occurs even with intransitive verbs for which a direct object is categorically prohibited. Experiment 2, however, demonstrated that this effect is not due to syntactic misanalysis but to disruption that occurs when a comma is absent at a subordinate clause/main clause boundary. Experiment 3 replicated the finding (M. J. Pickering & M. J. Traxler, 2003; M. J. Traxler & M. J. Pickering, 1996) that when a noun phrase "filler" is an implausible direct object for an optionally transitive relative clause verb, processing difficulty results; however, there was no evidence for such difficulty when the relative clause verb was strictly intransitive. Taken together, the 3 experiments undermine the support for the claim that the parser initially ignores a verb's subcategorization restrictions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of foveal processing difficulty on the perceptual span in reading: Implications for attention and eye movement control.

Two experiments were conducted to examine the effects of foveal processing difficulty on the perceptual span in reading. Subjects read sentences while their eye movements were recorded. By changing the text contingent on the reader's current point of fixation, foveal processing difficulty and the availability of parafoveal word information were independently manipulated. In Experiment 1, foveal processing difficulty was manipulated by lexical frequency, and in Experiment 2 foveal difficulty was manipulated by syntactic complexity. In both experiments, less parafoveal information was acquired when processing in the fovea was difficult. We conclude that the perceptual span is variable and attentionally constrained. We also discuss the implications of the results for current models of the relation between covert visual–spatial attention and eye movement control in reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Schema reliance for developmental goals increases from early to late adulthood: Improvement for the young, loss prevention for the old.

People tend to encode and retrieve information in terms of schemata, especially when processing resources are low. This study argues that the life-span schema about developmental goals constitutes a generalized expectation about the life course that associates young adults with growth and older adults with loss prevention. Predictions were that young and older adults possess this schema; that both age groups rely on it when remembering age-associated information about goals; and that this schema reliance is particularly pronounced among older adults, due to age-related difficulties in overcoming schemata. In Experiment 1, participants assigned growth or loss-prevention orientations to young and older faces and adhered to the life-span schema. In Experiment 2, participants were presented young and older faces paired with growth or loss prevention. When later asked to recognize faces and remember goal orientations, participants were more likely to remember young faces with growth and older faces with loss prevention than vice versa. This effect was more pronounced among older adults. Conclusions are that reliance on life-span schemata when remembering developmentally relevant information increases with age. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of age on using prosody to convey meaning and on judging communicative effectiveness.

We tested the effects of aging on the use of prosody to convey meaning and the ability to monitor communicative effectiveness. Participants read aloud ambiguous sentences with the goal of clearly communicating one designated meaning. Young and older adults produced intonational boundaries consistent with the designated meaning equally often, but listener judgments indicated that older adults disambiguated the sentences more often than chance and young adults did so only marginally more often than chance. Young adults believed they communicated their message clearly, and older adults evaluated their own communication even more favorably. Participants were more confident for structurally ambiguous sentences than for lexically ambiguous sentences (which cannot be differentiated through prosody), and older adults demonstrated more overconfidence than young adults for both types of ambiguous sentences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and the Ranschburg effect: No evidence of reduced response suppression in old age.

Two experiments tested 1 aspect of L. Hasher and R. T. Zacks's (1988) reduced inhibition hypothesis, namely, that old age impairs the ability to suppress information in working memory that is no longer relevant. In Experiment 1, young and older adults were asked to recall lists of letters in the correct order. Half of the lists contained repeated items while half were control lists. Recall of nonadjacent repeated items was worse than that of control items. This Ranschburg effect was larger (i.e., greater response suppression) in older than in young adults. In Experiment 2, young and older adults were required either to recall the list or to report if there was a repeated item. Repetition detection was high and similar in the 2 age groups. When age differences in overall performance were taken into account, there was evidence of increased repetition inhibition with age in both experiments. Thus, contrary to the general reduced inhibition hypothesis, the specific process of response suppression during serial recall is not reduced by aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Syntactic priming in 3- and 4-year-old children: Evidence for abstract representations of transitive and dative forms.

The current studies used a syntactic priming paradigm with 3- and 4-year-old children. In Experiment 1, children were asked to describe a series of drawings depicting transitive and dative relations to establish baseline production levels. In Experiment 2, an experimenter described a similar series of drawings using one of two syntactic forms (i.e., active/passive for transitive; double-object/prepositional for dative). Children were then asked to describe pictures identical to those shown in the corresponding baseline procedure. In both transitive and dative conditions, 4-year-old children were more likely to use a particular syntactic form if it had been used by the experimenter. Three-year-old children did not show priming effects, but their production of transitive sentences was higher following transitive primes than in Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, an additional group of 3-year-olds participated in a procedure in which they repeated the experimenter's sentences before describing the pictures. This procedure yielded significant priming effects for transitive and dative forms. These results indicate that very young children possess abstract syntactic representations, but that their access to these representations is sensitive to task demands. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of age and a divided attention task presented during encoding and retrieval on memory.

The present studies were designed to examine age differences in memory when attention was divided during encoding, retrieval, or at both times. In Experiment 1, Ss studied categorized words while performing a number-monitoring task during encoding, retrieval, or at both times. Older Ss' free recall and clustering performance declined more than that of young Ss when attention was divided at encoding, but there was no similar age interaction when divided attention occurred at retrieval. In Experiment 2, the task demands at retrieval were increased by using a fast-paced, cued-recall task. The results remained unchanged from Experiment 1. Again, an age interaction occurred with divided attention at encoding but not at retrieval. These results were unexpected, given the emphasis in the memory-aging literature on increased difficulty of retrieval by older adults. The findings pose difficulties for limited processing resource views of age differences in memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Life-span development of visual working memory: When is feature binding difficult?

We asked whether the ability to keep in working memory the binding between a visual object and its spatial location changes with development across the life span more than memory for item information. Paired arrays of colored squares were identical or differed in the color of one square, and in the latter case, the changed color was unique on that trial (item change) or was duplicated elsewhere in the array (color-location binding change). Children (8-10 and 11-12 years old) and older adults (65-85 years old) showed deficits relative to young adults. These were only partly simulated by dividing attention in young adults. The older adults had an additional deficiency, specifically in binding information, which was evident only when item- and binding-change trials were mixed together. In that situation, the older adults often overlooked the more subtle, binding-type changes. Some working memory processes related to binding undergo life-span development in an inverted-U shape, whereas other, bias- and salience-related processes that influence the use of binding information seem to develop monotonically. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Role of Age and Perceptual Symbols in Language Comprehension.

Older and younger participants read sentences about objects and were then shown a picture of an object that either matched or mismatched the implied shape of the object in the sentence. Participants' response times were recorded when they judged whether the object had been mentioned in the sentence. Responses were faster in the shape-matching condition for all participants, but the mismatch effect was stronger for older than for younger adults, even when the larger variability of the older group's response times was controlled for. These results suggest that older adults may construct stronger situation models than younger adults. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age-Related Differences in Localized Attentional Interference.

Attentional selection of an object in the visual field degrades processing of neighboring stimuli in young adults. A pair of experiments examined the effects of aging on such localized attentional interference. In Experiment 1, younger and older observers made speeded same-different judgments of target shapes that varied in spatial separation. Performance declined for both age groups as the distance between targets decreased, but an Age x Distance interaction indicated that the magnitude of this effect was larger for older adults. Experiment 2 ruled out sensory masking as an explanation for these findings. Results indicate that older observers experience losses in the ability to attend to multiple spatially proximal stimuli within the visual field. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inhibitory processes and spoken word recognition in young and older adults: The interaction of lexical competition and semantic context.

Two experiments were conducted to examine the importance of inhibitory abilities and semantic context to spoken word recognition in older and young adults. In Experiment 1, identification scores were obtained in 3 contexts: single words, low-predictability sentences, and high-predictability sentences. Additionally, identification performance was examined as a function of neighborhood density (number of items phonetically similar to a target word). Older adults had greater difficulty than young adults recognizing words with many neighbors (hard words). However, older adults also exhibited greater benefits as a result of adding contextual information. Individual differences in inhibitory abilities contributed significantly to recognition performance for lexically hard words but not for lexically easy words. The roles of inhibitory abilities and linguistic knowledge in explaining age-related impairments in spoken word recognition are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)