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

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate how age affects the ability to comprehend sentence meaning, specifically how individuals resolve pronouns to their corresponding nouns. The study included 34 young participants (20-29 years old) and 34 older participants (60-81 years old). The participants were presented with sentences containing two characters and a third-person singular pronoun. Stereotypical genders associated with character names were manipulated such that the pronoun had either one, two, or no possible antecedents, rendering the pronoun referentially unambiguous, ambiguous, or mismatched, respectively. Consistent with the prior findings on preserved syntactic processing with advanced age, event-related potential data time-locked to the critical pronouns showed a P600 effect to mismatched pronouns regardless of age. These results indicate that older adults, like their younger counterparts, have a strong preference for readily available antecedents. When the pronoun was ambiguous, younger adults showed a typical Nref effect-a sustained anterior negativity associated with elaborative inferencing to search for the referent. Older adults did not exhibit this effect, suggesting a reduction in elaborative processes for establishing coherence. Nevertheless, the Nref response to ambiguous pronouns was observed in a subset of older adults, who also showed a Nref instead of P600 response to mismatched pronouns. Overall, individuals who elicited the Nref response to ambiguous pronouns were associated with a higher level of print exposure, suggesting that life-long reading experience may help to counteract age-related decline. Together, these findings help characterize the differential effects of aging on pronominal understanding and provide initial electrophysiological evidence of the protective benefit of print exposure on language processing in the aging population. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).