Age Differences in On-Line Syntactic Processing

Stine‐Morrow, Elizabeth A. L.; Ryan, Sharon; Leonard, Jeanette S.

doi:10.1080/036107300750015714

Cited by 68 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…If so, then our finding that the inferences are understood and remembered to the same degree for older adults as young adults contradicts conclusions from previous studies that older adults' memory for propositions is poorer (e.g., Cohen, 1979; Engelkamp & Zimmer, 1997; Kemper, 1987; Kemtes & Kemper, 1997; Light & Capps, 1986; Meyer & Rice, 1981; Stine & Wingfield, 1988, 1990; Stine-Morrow, Ryan, & Leonard, 2000; Zurif, Swinney, Prather, Wingfield, & Brownell, 1995). However, again, these studies compared performance only on empirical measures, RTs and accuracy, not the individual components of processing that give rise to those measures.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 90%

Aging and predicting inferences: A diffusion model analysis

McKoon

Ratcliff

2013

Journal of Memory and Language

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In the domain of discourse processing, it has been claimed that older adults (60-90-year-olds) are less likely to encode and remember some kinds of information from texts than young adults. The experiment described here shows that they do make a particular kind of inference to the same extent that college-age adults do. The inferences examined were “predictive” inferences such as the inference that something bad would happen to the actress for the sentence “The director and cameraman were ready to shoot close-ups when suddenly the actress fell from the 14th story” (McKoon & Ratcliff, 1986). Participants read sentences like the actress one and then later they were asked to decide whether words that expressed an inference (e.g., “dead”) had or had not appeared explicitly in a sentence. To directly compare older adults' performance to college-age adults' performance, we used a sequential sampling diffusion model (Ratcliff, 1978) to map response times and accuracy onto a single dimension of the strength with which an inference was encoded. On this dimension, there were no significant differences between the older and younger adults.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 90%

Aging and predicting inferences: A diffusion model analysis

McKoon

Ratcliff

2013

Journal of Memory and Language

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“…On the other hand, we recognized that there is evidence that the mechanisms that support performance in STM tasks play a role in aspects of what may be called an “expanded” comprehension process. In many studies, end-of-sentence performance has been significantly correlated with WM capacity (King and Just, 1991; MacDonald et al, 1992; Just and Carpenter, 1992; Stine-Morrow et al, 2000; Kemper and Kemtes, 1999; see Waters and Caplan, 1996a and Caplan and Waters, 1999, for additional references). To account for this, Caplan and Waters (1999) argued that the postulated specialized memory system supported the initial, preferred, discourse congruent interpretation of a sentence (what we called “interpretive processing”), and that revisions of this structure and interpretation and the use of the product of the comprehension process to perform a task (what we called “post-interpretive processing”) could make use of mechanisms that support performance in STM tasks.…”

Section: The Boy Who the Girl Who Fell Down The Stairs Grabbed Losmentioning

confidence: 99%

Short-term memory, working memory, and syntactic comprehension in aphasia

Caplan

Michaud

Hufford

2013

Cognitive Neuropsychology

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Sixty one people with aphasia were tested on ten tests of short term memory (STM) and for the ability to use syntactic structure to determine the meanings of eleven types of sentences in three tasks – object manipulation, picture matching and picture matching with self-paced listening. Multilevel models showed relationships between measures of the ability to retain and manipulate item and order information in STM and accuracy and RT, and a greater relationship between these STM measures and accuracy and RT for several more complex sentence types in individual tasks. There were no effects of measures of STM that reflect the use of phonological codes or rehearsal on comprehension. There was only one effect of STM measures on self-paced listening times. There were double dissociations between performance on STM and individual comprehension tasks, indicating that normal STM is not necessary to perform normally on these tasks. The results are most easily related to the view that STM plays a facilitatory role in supporting the use of the products of the comprehension process to accomplish operations related to tasks.

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“…Moreover, age differences in sentence comprehension accuracy are larger for sentences that are more semantically or syntactically complex, and these differences in performance have been found to be dependent upon individual differences in verbal WM capacity ( Kemper, 1987 ; Stine and Hindman, 1994 ; Stine-Morrow et al, 2000 ; Christianson et al, 2006 ; Payne et al, 2014a ). For example, “garden path” sentences such as (1) introduce a temporary syntactic ambiguity.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Typically, the first verb warned is initially (and incorrectly) interpreted as the main verb of the sentence (rather than as the verb of the reduced relative clause), creating difficulty when the reader encounters the second verb conducted ; resolution thus requires a revision of the initial analysis ( Bever, 1970 ; Clifton et al, 2003 ), which entails maintaining the alternate parse of the sentence during processing. WM capacity is an important predictor of resolution in garden-path ambiguities in younger ( Just and Carpenter, 1992 ; MacDonald et al, 1992 ; Just and Varma, 2002 ) and older ( Kemtes and Kemper, 1997 ; Kemper et al, 2004 ; Christianson et al, 2006 ) adults, as well as in other syntactically complex constructions, such as object-relative clauses ( Stine-Morrow et al, 2000 ; DeDe et al, 2004 ), and long distance dependencies ( King and Kutas, 1995 ; Caplan et al, 2011 ; Payne et al, 2014a ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Effects of Home-Based Cognitive Training on Verbal Working Memory and Language Comprehension in Older Adulthood

Payne

Stine‐Morrow

2017

Front. Aging Neurosci.

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Effective language understanding is crucial to maintaining cognitive abilities and learning new information through adulthood. However, age-related declines in working memory (WM) have a robust negative influence on multiple aspects of language comprehension and use, potentially limiting communicative competence. In the current study (N = 41), we examined the effects of a novel home-based computerized cognitive training program targeting verbal WM on changes in verbal WM and language comprehension in healthy older adults relative to an active component-control group. Participants in the WM training group showed non-linear improvements in performance on trained verbal WM tasks. Relative to the active control group, WM training participants also showed improvements on untrained verbal WM tasks and selective improvements across untrained dimensions of language, including sentence memory, verbal fluency, and comprehension of syntactically ambiguous sentences. Though the current study is preliminary in nature, it does provide initial promising evidence that WM training may influence components of language comprehension in adulthood and suggests that home-based training of WM may be a viable option for probing the scope and limits of cognitive plasticity in older adults.

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Age Differences in On-Line Syntactic Processing

Cited by 68 publications

References 23 publications

Aging and predicting inferences: A diffusion model analysis

Aging and predicting inferences: A diffusion model analysis

Short-term memory, working memory, and syntactic comprehension in aphasia

The Effects of Home-Based Cognitive Training on Verbal Working Memory and Language Comprehension in Older Adulthood

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