Event-related potentials reveal increased dependency on linguistic context due to cognitive aging.

Abstract

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Semantic Processing in Healthy Aging and Alzheimer’s Disease: A Systematic Review of the N400 Differences

“…Some authors found that the latency of the N400 effect of older participants was delayed with decreasing performance at a reading span task to assess working memory [ 25 ]. However, there was no association between reading span and the size of the N400 effect in this study, nor with N400 amplitude measures in two other studies [ 45 , 46 ]. Some studies also reported associations between N400 amplitude measures and verbal fluency (tasks that combined phonological and semantic fluency) or vocabulary [ 45 , 46 ].…”

“…However, there was no association between reading span and the size of the N400 effect in this study, nor with N400 amplitude measures in two other studies [ 45 , 46 ]. Some studies also reported associations between N400 amplitude measures and verbal fluency (tasks that combined phonological and semantic fluency) or vocabulary [ 45 , 46 ]. Thus, there is a possibility that working memory, executive functions and/or lexical processing might explain some individual variability in the N400 ERP.…”

“…Interestingly, and in light of the explanation of semantic differences in terms of other cognitive functions, such as semantic control/inhibition, a few studies investigated the associations between the N400 and behavioral outcomes using correlations or regressions. Some reported no significant associations between N400 measures and accuracy of semantic judgments [ 11 ] or inhibition [ 45 ]. Some authors found that the latency of the N400 effect of older participants was delayed with decreasing performance at a reading span task to assess working memory [ 25 ].…”

A longitudinal event-related potentials study of idiom processing in healthy elderly adults

“…In la Roi et al's (2020) study, performance on the Verbal Fluency task significantly predicted participants' N400 and P600 amplitudes, indicating that the mechanisms underlying verbal fluency play a role in the use of context in literal and idiomatic sentence processing. La Roi et al ( 2020) also carried out a Dutch Reading Span task (Van Den Noort et al, 2008) to measure working memory capacity, and a Dutch version of the Paired-Associates task (Shimamura et al, 1995) to measure inhibition skills.…”

“…In a previous study, la Roi et al (2020) used ERPs to compare younger and elderly adults' processing of literal and idiomatic sentences in context. They found that 1) both younger and elderly adults showed facilitated processing of idiomatic relative to literal sentences, consistent with findings from previous studies (e.g., Beck & Weber, 2020;Canal et al, 2015;Carrol & Littlemore, 2020;Laurent et al, 2006;Rommers et al, 2013;Titone & Connine, 1999), 2) elderly adults were as able as younger adults to use context to facilitate the retrieval of word meanings in both literal and idiomatic sentences, and 3) elderly adults, but not younger adults, relied on context information for the subsequent integration of these word meanings in the sentence.…”