Effects of Healthy Aging and Gender on the Electrophysiological Correlates of Semantic Sentence Comprehension: The Development of Dutch Normative Data

Abstract

Purpose: The clinical use of event-related potentials in patients with language disorders is increasingly acknowledged. For this purpose, normative data should be available. Within this context, healthy aging and gender effects on the electrophysiological correlates of semantic sentence comprehension were investigated. Method: One hundred and ten healthy subjects (55 men and 55 women), divided among three age groups (young, middle aged, and elderly), performed a semantic sentence congruity task in the visual modality during electroencephalographic recording. Results: The early visual complex was affected by increasing age as shown by smaller P2 amplitudes in the elderly compared to the young. Moreover, the N400 effect in the elderly was smaller than in the young and was delayed compared to latency measures in both middle-aged and young subjects. The topography of age-related amplitude changes of the N400 effect appeared to be gender specific. The late positive complex effect was increased at frontal electrode sites from middle age on, but this was not statistically significant. No gender effects were detected regarding the early P1, N1, and P2, or the late positive complex effect. Conclusion: Especially aging effects were found during semantic sentence comprehension, and this from the level of perceptual processing on. Normative data are now available for clinical use.

Test–retest reliability of electroencephalographic and magnetoencephalographic measures elicited during language tasks: A literature review

“…In this context, effects of healthy ageing and gender on the elicited ERPs/ERFs should also be taken into account when interpreting the results of patients. Therefore, the availability of normative data for men and women from different age groups is beneficial (Aerts et al, 2013; Cocquyt et al, 2022; Cocquyt et al, in press; Dorme et al, 2023).…”

“… Lexical decision task (Holcomb & Neville, 1990) Categorical/associative word priming task (Cocquyt et al, 2022) Semantic sentence verification task (Cocquyt et al, in press) Presented in the auditory or visual modality …”

Single-trial ERP Quantification Using Neural Networks

“…In the paper of Cocquyt et al. ( 2023 ), the authors found that the latency of the N400 effect, i.e. the difference between the incorrect and correct evoked responses between 0.3 s and 0.5 s after stimulus onset, was significantly delayed in elderly subjects (ages 60) compared to both young (ages 20–39) and middle-aged subjects (ages 40–59).…”

“…For the second experimental dataset involving the N400 component elicited using a semantic sentence congruity task (SSCT), the dataset recorded by Cocquyt et al. ( 2023 ) was used. Briefly, 120 sentences, half of which were semantically correct while the other half contained a semantic violation at the end, were visually presented to 110 individuals.…”

Die N400-Komponente im EEG als Marker für Spracherwerb und Wortverarbeitung nach CI-Versorgung

“…fanden zudem einen Einfluss des Alters auf den N400-Effekt, der für die CI-Gruppe und die Kontrollgruppe gleichermaßen galt: Der N400-Effekt war für ältere Probanden geringer ausgeprägt als für jüngere Probanden. Dies repliziert Befunde aus der Literatur[22,23,24]. Die Ursache dieses Effekts ist noch ungeklärt.…”