Adult age differences in the effects of sentence context and stimulus degradation during visual word recognition.

Abstract

I investigated adult age differences in the efficiency of feature-extraction processes during visual word recognition. Participants were 24 young adults (M age = 21.0 years) and 24 older adults (M age = 66.5 years). On each trial, subjects made a word/nonword discrimination (i.e., lexical decision) regarding a target letter-string that was presented as the final item of a sentence context. The target was presented either intact or degraded visually (by the presence of asterisks between adjacent letters). Age differences in lexical decisions speed were greater for degraded targets than for intact targets, suggesting an age-related slowing in the extraction of feature-level information. For degraded word targets, however, the amount of performance benefit provided by the sentence context was greater for older adults than for young adults. It thus appears that an age-related deficiency at an early stage of word recognition is accompanied by an increased contribution from semantic context.

The Use of Contextual Information by Right Brain-Damaged Individuals in the Resolution of Ambiguous Pronouns

“…Further evidence for their use of this information was found in their sensitivity to the verb consistency factor, resulting in an effect of implicit causality. These results suggesting no age differences in the use of contextual information are consistent with a numher of studies (Cohen & Faulkner, 1983;Light & Capps, 1986;Madden, 1988) and with the emerging view that the ability to use this information and make inferences is preserved in old age when the demands placed upon working memory are nùnimal (Burke & Yee, 1984;Light et al, 1982, Light & Alhenson, 1988Light, Valencia-Laver, & Zavis, 1991;Zelinski & Miura, 1990). The following discussion is, therefore, equally applicable to both age groups.…”

Age-related effects on speech production: A review

“…Their comprehension of spoken and written words and sentences is largely intact. This has been demonstrated in semantic priming studies, in which a word or sentence prime that is semantically related to a following target word has been found to speed up recognition of the target (as indicated by correct lexical decision or naming) as much in older as in young adults (e.g., Burke, White, & Diaz, 1987;Madden, 1988Madden, , 1992Madden, Pierce, & Allen, 1993;Paul, 1996; for reviews, see Burke et al, 2000;Laver & Burke, 1993). Similarly, when ambiguous words are embedded in a sentence context (e.g., Some change was removed from her pockets), older adults are as efficient as young adults in using the semantic context to disambiguate the meaning of the words (e.g., Hopkins, Kellas, & Paul, 1995;Paul, 1996; but see Wingfield, Alexander, & Cavigelli, 1994).…”

Reading with filtered fixations: Adult age differences in the effectiveness of low-level properties of text within central vision.

“…In particular, interactions between visual processing and cognitive processes associated with the syntactic, linguistic, and semantic content of language are normal components of reading (e.g., Jordan & Thomas, 2002;Rayner, 2009) and are likely to involve the influence of spatial frequencies in central vision. Indeed, although the extent to which older adults benefit more from contextual cues during reading is controversial (e.g., Madden, 1988;Stine-Morrow, Miller, Gagne, & Hertzog, 2008;Federmeier & Kutas, 2005;Federmeier, Kutas, & Schul, 2010), loss of sensitivity to spatial frequencies in older age may be offset by a greater use of contextual information, and this is consistent with the view that older readers compensate for processing difficulties by a greater reliance on discourse context (e.g., Stine-Morrow et al, 2008). Moreover, for both young and older adults, when fixations Reading With Filtered Fixations 13 are made during reading, information is also acquired from locations extending outside central vision in the direction of reading, and this parafoveal information is used to pre-process the identity of words before the next saccade is made in their direction (see Rayner 1998Rayner , 2009).…”