Syntactic comprehension priming and lexical boost effects in older adults

In the prime of life: ERP evidence for syntactic comprehension priming in older adults

“…Behaviorally, both age groups experienced abstract syntactic priming (in the absence of lexical overlap) and lexical boost effects (where both syntactic and verbal overlap were included): in both groups, Boosted Targets were read faster than Primed Targets, which were in turn read faster than Unprimed Targets. This reinforces recent evidence suggesting older adults are as susceptible to syntactic priming as younger adults in behavioral responses (Hardy, Messenger, and Maylor 2017;van Boxtel and Lawyer 2023), and contradicts past literature suggesting syntax processing declines with age (e.g., Norman, Kemper, and Kynette 1992; Poulisse, Wheeldon, and Segaert van Boxtel & Lawyer Syntactic comprehension JLAR 1 (2023) 10. 15460/jlar.2023.1.1.1108Zhu, Hou, and Yang 2018).…”

“…15460/jlar.2023.1.1.1108Zhu, Hou, and Yang 2018). We suggest this dichotomy is due to previous investigations' focus on declarative, explicit measures, while syntactic priming relies on implicit, non-declarative cognitive skills (see further Heyselaar, Wheeldon, and Segaert 2021;van Boxtel and Lawyer 2023). This study therefore makes the case for further investigations into older adults' sentence processing using implicit tasks.…”

“…These structures involve a temporary ambiguity before the word "by", as the first verb may be interpreted as a matrix verb (where, in the above example, the parents caused someone to worry) or as a past participle. Disambiguation effects, observable as an increase in P600 amplitude at the disambiguating word "by", show readers commit to interpreting the sentence in favor of a relative clause interpretation (Mecklinger et al 1995), and syntactic priming may cause attenuations of this disambiguation effect (Tooley, Traxler, and Swaab 2009;van Boxtel and Lawyer 2023). Ledoux, Traxler, and Swaab 2007 found reduced P600 amplitudes in primed compared to unprimed reduced relatives, and suggested facilitated processing of primed structures reduced unexpected ambiguity effects.…”

“…Linguistic evidence for the Salthouse (1996) account is provided by Grossman et al (2002), who studied a group of Parkinson's Disease patients and found that longer processing speeds were associated with reduced accuracy on sentence comprehension queries. Additionally, studies routinely find slower overall reading speeds in older compared to younger adults (Hartley et al 1994;Stine-Morrow, Loveless, and Soederberg 1996;Brysbaert 2019;van Boxtel and Lawyer 2023;among many others).…”

“…Nevertheless, numerous recent investigations have reported little to no age-related difference on various sentence comprehension measures (Hardy, Messenger, and Maylor 2017;Malyutina et al 2018;van Boxtel and Lawyer 2023). This recent increase in reports of age-invariant sentence comprehension seems to be associated with a general shift from the use of declarative measures, such as paragraph comprehension and sentence recall scores, to implicit paradigms, including priming, eye-tracking tasks, and Event-Related Potential (ERP) recordings (e.g., DeDe 2014; though cf.…”