Do the waves begin to waver? ERP studies of language processing in the elderly

Abstract

Publisher Summary The chapter discusses the event-related brain potential (ERP) studies of language processing in the elderly. The chapter reviews what is currently known about the electrophysiology of visual language processing in the elderly and what ERPs tell about age-related changes in the neural substrates of reading. While language processes have usually been thought to be impervious to aging, it is now clear that some changes do occur. Moreover, many of these changes often seem to be directly linked to changes in the efficacy of other cognitive operations affected by aging, particularly the active suppression of irrelevant information and the management of working memory (WM). One way to study these changes is to record ERPs from the scalp in response to individual words, either in isolation or in sentences. Some of the more profound effects of aging on psychological and language processes seem to stem from changes in inhibitory processes and their effects on memory. The chapter elaborates on two equally important issues in the psycholinguistic literature—namely, lexical access and the processing of syntactic structure.