Abstract
In spite of the rapidity of everyday speech, older adults tend to keep up relatively well in day-to-day listening. In laboratory settings older adults do not respond as quickly as younger adults in off-line tests of sentence comprehension, but the question is whether comprehension itself is actually slower. Two unique features of the human eye were used to address this question. First, we tracked eye-movements as 20 young adults and 20 healthy older adults listened to sentences that referred to one of four objects pictured on a computer screen. Although the older adults took longer to indicate the referenced object with a cursor-pointing response, their gaze moved to the correct object as rapidly as that of the younger adults. Second, we concurrently measured dilation of the pupil of the eye as a physiological index of effort. This measure revealed that although poorer hearing acuity did not slow processing, success came at the cost of greater processing effort.
Highlights
The early literature on mental performance in adult aging was largely one of cataloging age-related deficits—most notably, ineffective learning and poor memory retrieval for recent events
The eye fixation time (EFT) and the ORTs were measured from the word representing the knowledge point (KP) for that sentence
Our results show that general slowing may be a hallmark of adult aging, its effects do not apply uniformly across all linguistic operations
Summary
The early literature on mental performance in adult aging was largely one of cataloging age-related deficits—most notably, ineffective learning and poor memory retrieval for recent events. It is the case that aging brings changes to the neural structures and network dynamics that carry cognition (Burke and Barnes, 2006; Raz and Kennedy, 2009), with behavioral consequences that include reduced working memory capacity and a general slowing in a number of perceptual and cognitive operations (Salthouse, 1994, 1996; McCabe et al, 2010). This deficit view of aging raises an intriguing paradox when applied to the everyday comprehension of spoken language. Barring significant neuropathology or serious hearing impairment, comprehension of spoken language remains one of the best-preserved of our cognitive functions
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