Predictive Representation for Upcoming Linguistic Input in Younger and Older Adults

Abstract

The immediate use of the contextual information to predict the upcoming information during sentence comprehension may vary depending on the aspects of the linguistic and world knowledge and the cognitive ability of readers. In this study, we investigated how well older readers employ their linguistic and world knowledge to develop the expectation for the upcoming information during sentence comprehension. In two offline tasks (cloze and listing), older and young readers were asked to complete sentence fragments (when agents and recipients were given or when agents and patients were given). The responses were used to compute predictability measurements (structural and lexical predictability). We found no aging effect in the production of likely structural choices and likely lexical choices, meaning that the most predictable ones to older readers were also the most predictable to young readers. Significant aging effect emerged in the production of unlikely choices; older readers were more predictable to unlikely structures but less predictable to unlikely words. We discuss the contextual sensitivity of older readers in formulating their knowledge representation for what is coming up next.