Differential Age Effects on Semantic and Syntactic Priming

Abstract

Adult age differences in the processing of semantic and syntactic information during language comprehension were investigated in a lexical decision task in which the target word was preceded by a sentence fragment. Sentence fragment and target were presented visually and made up either a correct or an incorrect sentence containing either a semantic violation (selectional restriction violation) or a syntactic violation (subcategorisation violation). Experiment 1 revealed a differential age effect for the processing of syntactic, but not for the processing of semantic violations. Experiment 2, using visually degraded targets, demonstrated that this differential effect was independent of peripheral processing aspects, such as visual encoding. Experiment 3 including a neutral baseline condition revealed that the differential age effect on syntactic processing was due to controlled rather than to automatic aspects of priming, as it was observed for the cost component, but not for the bene”t component. Experiment 4 revealed that this effect was independent of the timing parameters used for stimulus presentation. It appears that age can have differential effects on specific cognitive domains, such as syntax and semantics. This may be attributable to the amount of controlled processes involved in syntactic and semantic priming.