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.

[1]  R Ratcliff,et al.  Testing theories of language processing: an empirical investigation of the on-line lexical decision task. , 1994, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[2]  Denise C. Park,et al.  Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition Age Differences in Inhibition: Possible Causes and Consequences , 2022 .

[3]  M. Just,et al.  From the SelectedWorks of Marcel Adam Just 1992 A capacity theory of comprehension : Individual differences in working memory , 2017 .

[4]  G. Waters,et al.  The relationship between age, verbal working memory, and language comprehension. , 2004, Psychology and aging.

[5]  Robin K. Morris,et al.  Working memory, animacy, and verb class in the processing of relative clauses , 2005 .

[6]  Morten H. Christiansen,et al.  Processing of relative clauses is made easier by frequency of occurrence , 2007 .

[7]  M. Just,et al.  Individual differences in syntactic processing: The role of working memory , 1991 .

[8]  T. Salthouse,et al.  Speed and knowledge as determinants of adult age differences in verbal tasks. , 1993, Journal of gerontology.

[9]  Morten H. Christiansen,et al.  Experience and sentence processing: Statistical learning and relative clause comprehension , 2009, Cognitive Psychology.

[10]  Michael J. Spivey,et al.  Gradiency and Visual Context in Syntactic Garden-Paths. , 2007, Journal of memory and language.

[11]  Erik D. Reichle,et al.  Using E-Z reader to model the effects of higher level language processing on eye movements during reading , 2009, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[12]  M. Just,et al.  Working memory constraints on the processing of syntactic ambiguity , 1992, Cognitive Psychology.

[13]  Edward Gibson,et al.  Syntactic Complexity in Ambiguity Resolution , 2002 .

[14]  E. Gibson.  Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies , 1998, Cognition.

[15]  G. Altmann,et al.  The real-time mediation of visual attention by language and world knowledge: Linking anticipatory (and other) eye movements to linguistic processing , 2007 .

[16]  Michael J Cortese,et al.  Handbook of Psycholinguistics , 2011 .

[17]  F Ferreira,et al.  Exploring the use of prosody during language comprehension using the auditory moving window technique , 1996, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[18]  C. Clifton,et al.  The independence of syntactic processing , 1986 .

[19]  S. Kemper,et al.  Limitations on Syntactic Processing , 2002 .

[20]  T. Salthouse,et al.  Decomposing adult age differences in working memory. , 1991 .

[21]  David Caplan,et al.  Working memory and connectionist models of parsing: A reply to MacDonald and Christiansen (2002). , 2002 .

[22]  R Ratcliff,et al.  Sentential context and on-line lexical decision. , 1994, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[23]  Susan M. Garnsey,et al.  Evoked potentials and the study of sentence comprehension , 1989, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[24]  Julie C. Sedivy,et al.  Subject Terms: Linguistics Language Eyes & eyesight Cognition & reasoning , 1995 .

[25]  P. Gordon,et al.  Similarity-based interference during language comprehension: Evidence from eye tracking during reading. , 2006, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[26]  G. Waters,et al.  The reliability and stability of verbal working memory measures , 2003, Behavior research methods, instruments, & computers : a journal of the Psychonomic Society, Inc.

[27]  A Wingfield,et al.  The allocation of memory resources during sentence comprehension: Evidence from the elderly , 1995, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[28]  T. Salthouse.  The processing-speed theory of adult age differences in cognition. , 1996, Psychological review.

[29]  Julie C. Sedivy,et al.  Eye movements and spoken language comprehension: Effects of visual context on syntactic ambiguity resolution , 2002, Cognitive Psychology.

[30]  G. Waters,et al.  Verbal Working Memory Capacity and On-Line Sentence Processing Efficiency in the Elderly , 2002 .

[31]  Robin K. Morris,et al.  Processing Subject and Object Relative Clauses: Evidence from Eye Movements , 2002 .

[32]  G. Waters,et al.  The relationship between age, processing speed, working memory capacity, and language comprehension , 2005, Memory.

[33]  Randall Hendrick,et al.  Memory-Load Interference in Syntactic Processing , 2002, Psychological science.

[34]  G. Waters,et al.  The Measurement of Verbal Working Memory Capacity and Its Relation to Reading Comprehension , 1996, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology.

[35]  M K Tanenhaus,et al.  Eye Movements and Lexical Access in Spoken-Language Comprehension: Evaluating a Linking Hypothesis between Fixations and Linguistic Processing , 2000, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[36]  Richard L. Lewis,et al.  Computational principles of working memory in sentence comprehension , 2006, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[37]  Matthew J Traxler,et al.  Analyzing individual differences in sentence processing performance using multilevel models , 2007, Behavior research methods.

[38]  Janet D. Fodor,et al.  Using cross-modal lexical decision tasks to investigate sentence processing. , 1994, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[39]  David Caplan,et al.  Age, working memory, and on-line syntactic processing in sentence comprehension. , 2001 .

[40]  Susan Kemper,et al.  Constraints on language : aging, grammar, and memory , 2002 .

[41]  E. Stine-Morrow,et al.  Age differences in on-line syntactic processing. , 2000, Experimental aging research.