Abstract
While aging is associated with increased knowledge, it is also associated with decreased semantic integration. To investigate brain activation changes during semantic integration, a sample of forty-eight 25–75 year-old adults read sentences with high cloze (HC) and low cloze (LC) probability while functional magnetic resonance imaging was conducted. Significant age-related reduction of cloze effect (LC vs. HC) was found in several regions, especially the left middle frontal gyrus (MFG) and right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), which play an important role in semantic integration. Moreover, when accounting for global gray matter volume reduction, the age-cloze correlation in the left MFG and right IFG was absent. The results suggest that brain structural atrophy may disrupt brain response in aging brains, which then show less brain engagement in semantic integration.
Highlights
Language comprehension is a critical ability for daily life
Semantic integration is associated with brain activation in multiple brain regions, including the bilateral inferior/middle frontal gyrus (I/ MFG), the bilateral middle temporal gyrus (MTG), and the anterior temporal lobe (ATL)
To avoid tapping processes other than semantic integration, the present study focused on the differences between low cloze (LC) and high cloze (HC) sentences
Summary
Language comprehension is a critical ability for daily life. Semantic integration is a key process in understanding meaning from any given flow of information. While aging is associated with increased vocabulary and augmented stores of world knowledge [2], cumulative evidence has revealed age-related declines in semantic integration during sentence comprehension [3,4]. Semantic integration is associated with brain activation in multiple brain regions, including the bilateral inferior/middle frontal gyrus (I/ MFG), the bilateral middle temporal gyrus (MTG), and the anterior temporal lobe (ATL). This activation has been demonstrated in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies [1,5,7,8,9,10]
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