Abstract
In sentences with long-distance dependency relations (“The man whom the police arrested is thin”), there are two kinds of distance between the gap (object position of arrested) and the filler man: linear (the intervening words in linear order), and structural (the intervening nodes in the syntactic tree). Previous studies found that older adults have difficulty comprehending sentences with long-distance dependency relations. However, it is not clear whether they are more disrupted by longer structural distance between gaps and fillers, or longer linear distance. There is a distinction between linear distance and structural distance, in that the former is directly related to working memory whereas the latter is associated with syntactic ability. By examining the effect of linear distance and structural distance on sentence processing by older adults, we can identify whether age-related decline in sentence comprehension is attributed to working memory dysfunction or syntactic decline. For this purpose, structural distance and linear distance were manipulated in Mandarin relative clauses (RCs). 30 older adults and 33 younger adults were instructed to perform a self-paced reading task. We found that both groups performed more slowly as structural distance increased, and less accurately when linear distance increased. More importantly, there was a significant interaction between linear distance and age group in the accuracy of comprehension, with linear distance disrupting older adults more than younger adults in offline processing. The findings suggest that the age-related decline in offline sentence comprehension might be attributable to the decline in working memory, rather than syntactic ability. Practical implications, limitations, and directions for future studies are discussed.
Highlights
Aging adults have difficulties comprehending sentences with long-distance dependency relations (LDDs), such as relative clauses (RCs) (Davis and Ball, 1989; Obler et al, 1991)
The result of the analysis indicates that there was a significant effect of age group, ß = −1.26, SE = 0.026, z = −4.92, p < 0.001, and a significant interaction between age group and linear distance, ß = 0.86, SE = 0.39, z = 2.19, p < 0.05
In the RC verb segment (“yanchang”), results of mixed effects modeling revealed that there was a significant effect of age group, ß = 0.41, SE = 0.08, t = 5.22, p < 0.001, and a significant effect of structural distance, ß = −0.08, SE = 0.03, t = −3.10, p < 0.01
Summary
Aging adults have difficulties comprehending sentences with long-distance dependency relations (LDDs), such as relative clauses (RCs) (Davis and Ball, 1989; Obler et al, 1991). LDDs frequently appear in sentences involving wh-movement (“He helped the man whom the wolf attacked”), where the filler (man) moves from its original syntactic position, and leaves behind it an empty position known as the gap. The comprehension of such sentences requires the processing of syntactic structures. In processing that sentence “He helped the man whom the wolf attacked”, listeners or readers must understand that man is the patient of the action attack and wolf is the agent They need to temporarily store the filler man in memory in order to integrate it with the gap. In spite of the numerous studies of the Sentence Processing and Aging decline of sentence comprehension in older adults (e.g., Kemper, 1986; Zurif et al, 1995; Stine-Morrow et al, 2000; Waters and Caplan, 2001), it is still not clear whether age-related decline in sentence comprehension is the result of syntactic decline or working memory decline
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