On-line language processing in older adults. The case of pronominal relations.
Inger Seits · Utrecht University Repository (Utrecht University) · 2005
This study investigates on-line language processing in older adults. It is hypothesized that older adults show a decline in their processing resources that can be employed during language processing, resulting in differences between younger and older adults when their on-line sentence interpretation is tested. Such differences might be observed in sentences that exert a higher demand on processing resources for interpretation. Two on-line experiments are performed, examining reaction times in a lexical decision task. In this task, varying interpretive demands are imposed by different pronoun and reflexive-antecedent relations (logophoric reflexive - antecedent relations vs. coargument reflexive - antecedent relations and bound variable pronoun - antecedent relations vs. referring pronoun - antecedent relations). Since the interpretation of logophoric reflexives and bound variable pronouns is assumed to cause a higher load on the processing system, these pronominal relations are expected to give rise to longer reaction times already in younger subjects, and to disproportionate longer reaction times in older adults. The results show that the reaction times of the older adults are not significantly longer for the more demanding sentence types compared to the younger subjects. The hypothesis of an age related decline in language processing cannot be confirmed; the older adults are slower, but they are slower on all sentence types. This suggests an age related slow down in the execution of general cognitive tasks, not attributable to language processing per se. However, some results tend to suggest that the hypothesized age related decline is not observable in terms of longer reaction times for older adults, but in terms of a delayed syntactic processor in older adults. In that case, the effects of interpreting sentence types that impose a higher load to the system will be observable at some later point during sentence interpretation. This is an interesting point for further research.