Anaphor Comprehension in Younger and Older Adults

Abstract

This research was aimed at evaluating adult age differences in language comprehension, which has been hypothesized to decline in normal older adults. Three experiments were conducted to investigate the comprehension rate of pairs of related sentences. In Experiment 1, the related material consisted of either terms repeated from the first sentence or terms associatively related to the antecedent. In Experiment 2, the generality of the antecedent term in the sentence pairs varied, as did its typicality. In both experiments, young-old (age 55-69) and old-old (age 70-87) adults read the target sentences in the pairs more slowly than did young adults (age 20-36); age, however, did not interact with the condition. Experiment 3 repeated the conditions of Experiment 2, but, since only one sentence at a time was visible during a trial, the participants had to remember the first sentence while reading the target sentence. Young participants (aged 20-35) showed the same treatment effects as in Experiment 2, but the old (aged 55-86) showed deficits in online comprehension. The results of the three experiments suggest that the speed of comprehension processes required to match related terms in sentence pairs are not impaired with age as long as they do not have to be remembered.