Aging and the Use of Context in Ambiguity Resolution: Complex Changes From Simple Slowing

Dagerman, Karen; MacDonald, Maryellen C.; Harm, Michael W.

doi:10.1207/s15516709cog0000_46

Cited by 48 publications

(54 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…This pattern is consistent with Dagerman et al's (2006) observation of less effective on-line ambiguity resolution in older adults when semantic contextual support was not available. More generally, the pattern of aging effects we observe across the two context types provides a reconciliation of the disparate patterns that have been observed across the literature looking at age effects on ambiguity resolution (Balota & Duchek, 1991;Dagerman, MacDonald, & Harm, 2006;Hopkins, Kellas, & Paul, 1995;Meyer & Federmeier, 2010;Swaab, Brown, & Hagoort, 1998), in showing that when age-related differences will be observed depends on the nature of the context information available to support ambiguity resolution.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 74%

Differential age effects on lexical ambiguity resolution mechanisms

Federmeier¹,

Lee²

2010

PsycEXTRA Dataset

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Multiple neurocognitive subsystems are involved in resolving lexical ambiguity under different circumstances. We examined how processing in these subsystems changes with normal aging by comparing ERP responses to homographs and unambiguous words completing congruent sentences (with both semantic and syntactic contextual information) or syntactic prose (syntactic information only). Like young adults in prior work, older adults elicited more negative N400s to homographs in congruent sentences, suggesting mismatch between the context and residual activation of the contextually-irrelevant sense. However, the frontal negativity seen in young adults to homographs in syntactically well-defined but semantically neutral contexts was absent in older adults as a group, suggesting decline in recruiting additional neural resources to aid difficult semantic selection. A subset of older adults with high verbal fluency maintained a young-like effect pattern.Human language is difficult in part because it consists of inherently arbitrary pairings between forms and meanings. Moreover, a single form is oftentimes associated with multiple interpretations. For example, 'watch' can refer to a timing device or an action of observing. One of the challenges of human language processing is therefore to solve these ubiquitous one-to-many mapping problems in the face of time pressure, using (when possible) a variety of contextual constraints such as lexical associations, syntactic structure, and message-level semantic information.Aging is usually associated with cognitive as well as biological decline. However, it has been shown that different aspects of cerebral and cognitive aging take place along multiple trajectories. For example, frontal lobe regions undergo more age-related deterioration than other brain areas in terms of volume (Raz et al., 2005), amount of grey and white matter (Moseley, 2002;Resnick, Pham, Kraut, Zonderman, & Davatzikos, 2003), and white matter integrity (Head et al., 2004;Sullivan & Pfefferbaum, 2006). Similar disproportional agerelated changes are also found across cognitive domains: in particular, executive/controlled processes (which are usually considered to be frontally mediated), as opposed to stimulusdriven ones, tend to be more affected by age (DiGirolamo et al., 2001;Foster, Black, Buck, & Bronskill, 1997; Hasher, Zacks, & May, 1999;Jonides et al., 2000;Vanderaspoilden, Adam, Van Der Linden, & Morais, 2007).Differential age effects have also been observed within the specific domain of language processing. Overall, language has been described as a facet of cognitive processing that is (Burke & Peters, 1986;Howard, 1980;Park et al., 2002;Stern, Prather, Swinney, & Zurif, 1991). However, in fact, some aspects of language abilities are better preserved than others. On the one hand, there is ample evidence that word-related knowledge and the ability to link perceptual word forms to meaning remains relatively intact across the lifespan. For example, it has been shown that, across adulthood, vocabulary ...

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 74%

Differential age effects on lexical ambiguity resolution mechanisms

Federmeier¹,

Lee²

2010

PsycEXTRA Dataset

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“…Just as elderly people benefit from select adult-controlled strategies that include reduced cognitive load, slower linguistic input, and intraturn pauses designed to facilitate syntactic analyses (Dagerman, McDonald, & Harm, 2006;Titon et al, 2006), so do children with auditory processing difficulties (Rowe, Pollard, & Rowe, 2005). Phrasal intraturn pauses improve the attention skills of children with auditory processing atypicalities (Rowe et al, 2005).…”

Section: Phrasal Intraturn Pausementioning

confidence: 99%

Narrative Comprehension Abilities of Children with Typical Hearing and Children Using Hearing Aids: A Pilot Study

Zupan¹,

Dempsey²

2013

TVR

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“…Similar qualitative effects of simple slowness have been suggested to explain effects of cognitive aging on the online use of semantic context in the resolution of lexical ambiguity. Dagerman, MacDonald, and Harm (2006) reported that young and elderly adults were equally good at using prior biasing context to resolve lexical ambiguity in an offline task, but that elderly adults failed to use this information (in time) during online comprehension. Their analysis suggested that variations across different experiments in whether or not elderly adults made good use of context information to interpret ambiguous words could be accounted for by variations in (a) the time available to retrieve and make use of context information, and (b) the strength of the context manipulation.…”

Section: The Time-course Of Discourse Prominence Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Discourse prominence effects on 2.5-year-old children's interpretation of pronouns

Song

Fisher

2007

Lingua

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Three experiments examined 2.5-year-olds' sensitivity to discourse structure in pronoun interpretation. Children heard simple two-character stories illustrated by pictures on two video screens. In Experiments 1 and 2, one character in each story was established as more prominent than the other in several context sentences because it was mentioned first, appeared in subject position, was mentioned more often, and was pronominalized once. In Experiment 3, one character was singled out as more prominent only by being mentioned first and placed in subject position. In all three experiments, after hearing a pronoun subject in the final (test) sentence of each story, children looked longer at the character established as more prominent in the preceding sentences. These experiments show that 2.5-year-olds, like older children and adults, interpret pronouns relative to a discourse representation in which referents are ranked in prominence, and that the prominence of discourse referents is influenced by some of the same factors that guide pronoun interpretation in adulthood.

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Aging and the Use of Context in Ambiguity Resolution: Complex Changes From Simple Slowing

Cited by 48 publications

References 46 publications

Differential age effects on lexical ambiguity resolution mechanisms

Differential age effects on lexical ambiguity resolution mechanisms

Narrative Comprehension Abilities of Children with Typical Hearing and Children Using Hearing Aids: A Pilot Study

Discourse prominence effects on 2.5-year-old children's interpretation of pronouns

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