Abstract
Cognitive changes in aging include working memory (WM) decline, which may hamper language comprehension. An increase in WM demands in older adults would probably provoke a poorer sentence processing performance in this age group. A way to increase the WM load is to separate two lexical units in an agreement relation (i.e., adjective and noun), in a given sentence. To test this hypothesis, event-related potentials (ERPs) were collected from Spanish speakers (30 older adults, mean age = 66.06 years old; and 30 young adults, mean age = 25.7 years old) who read sentences to detect grammatical errors. The sentences varied with regard to (1) the gender agreement of the noun and adjective, where the gender of the adjective either agreed or disagreed with the noun, and (2) the WM load (i.e., the number of words between the noun and adjective in the sentence). No significant behavioral differences between groups were observed in the accuracy of the response, but older adults showed longer reaction times regardless of WM load condition. Compared with young participants, older adults showed a different pattern of ERP components characterized by smaller amplitudes of LAN, P600a, and P600b effects when the WM load was increased. A smaller LAN effect probably reflects greater difficulties in processing the morpho-syntactic features of the sentence, while smaller P600a and P600b effects could be related to difficulties in recovering and mapping all sentence constituents. We concluded that the ERP pattern in older adults showed subtle problems in syntactic processing when the WM load was increased, which was not sufficient to affect response accuracy but was only observed to result in a longer reaction time.
Highlights
Aging results in cognitive changes, for instance, deterioration in working memory (WM) (Park et al, 2002)
We compared behavioral and event-related potentials (ERPs) responses of older adults with those of a group of young adults to explore the effects of WM load on the gender agreement processing in sentence comprehension
Considering that aging entails a decline in the WM system and difficulties in the syntactic processing of complex sentences (Kemper, 1986, 1987; Kemper et al, 1990, 2001), we expected that older adults would show fewer correct answers and longer reaction times (RTs) than the young adults
Summary
Aging results in cognitive changes, for instance, deterioration in working memory (WM) (Park et al, 2002). WM is a cognitive system that holds the available information while manipulating it for different cognitive tasks (Baddeley, 2003). There are various positions about how the limitations of this system may affect language. Just and Carpenter (1992) proposed that verbal WM has a limited capacity and requires storing linguistic information as it is processed. An increase in the Syntactic Processing in Normal Aging complexity or length of the sentence may affect sentence comprehension because the information in feature bundles or chunks (i.e., partial representations of linguistic constituents of information; Lewis et al, 2006) decays in WM. Other authors propose that each language process is supported by a different WM resource, which can prevent information decay (Waters and Caplan, 1996; Jackendoff, 2007)
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