Individual differences in the processing of referential dependencies: Evidence from event-related potentials

Electrophysiological differences in older and younger adults’ anaphoric but not cataphoric pronoun processing in the absence of age-related behavioural slowdown

“…However, unlike Kemmer and colleagues, we found an additional anterior negativity in the older adults' processing of anaphoric pronouns, which was not present either in the younger adults or in the cataphoric conditions. It is in fact not uncommon that pronoun resolution studies report the presence of an anterior negativity, which is thought to occur during resolving ambiguity that is associated with unknown antecedents or memory retrieval processes 32,40,[51][52][53] . One possible explanation for the presence of an anterior negativity in the older adults only is greater demands for memory resources during anaphora processing.…”

Age-related differences in understanding pronominal reference in sentence comprehension: An electrophysiological investigation.

“…Responses to ambiguous referential expressions, on the other hand, have been found to elicit a Nref effect—a sustained frontal negative response starting approximately 200 ms after stimulus onset (e.g., Boudewyn et al, 2015; Fiorentino et al, 2018; Nieuwland et al, 2007; Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2006). The Nref ambiguity effect selectively tracks referential ambiguity during discourse comprehension even without an explicit reference selection task, and it can be modulated by contextual cues as well as individual characteristics of readers.…”

“…Arslan et al (2020) proposed that this anterior negativity reflects additional resources recruited by older adults to compensate for increased processing demands for feature-mismatched pronouns. However, based on the characteristics of the Nref delineated in the literature (Boudewyn et al, 2015;Fiorentino et al, 2018;Nieuwland, 2014;Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2006), we hypothesized that the additional negativity observed by Arslan et al (2020) reflects an alternative reference processing strategy from a subset of older adults who were able to allocate resources to make elaborative referential inferences for feature-mismatched pronouns for which a straightforward coreference is lacking. As a first step toward answering this question, we took a datadriven approach by identifying a subset of older adults who were able to elicit Nref-like responses to ambiguous pronouns and analyzed their responses to mismatched pronouns.…”

“…Additionally, the Nref ambiguity effect can be eliminated when a character leaves the story and becomes an implausible antecedent (Nieuwland et al, 2007). The Nref ambiguity effect has also been shown to vary based on readers’ individual characteristics, such as their working memory capacity and language skills—young adults with higher working memory capacity tend to exhibit larger effects (e.g., Boudewyn et al, 2015; Fiorentino et al, 2018; Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2006), as do those with higher verbal ability (measured by vocabulary scores, Boudewyn et al, 2015). Taken together, these findings suggest that the initiation of the Nref response is influenced by multiple factors, including cognitive and language abilities.…”