The Processing of Morphology in Old Age

Abstract

Taking advantage of the rich morphological structure of Hebrew, the current article aims to examine whether age affects the processing of morphological forms through an investigation of 2 systematic morphological paradigms. Forty-eight young and 48 old Hebrew speakers completed 2 experiments: the 1st investigated sensitivity to subject-verb gender incongruity in a reading task, and the 2nd examined parsing of pseudoverbs containing existing and nonexisting consonantal roots in a lexical-decision task. Older adults were slower relative to the young, but both groups were slower on incongruent relative to congruent targets and on a pseudoverb with a real root relative to a pseudoverb with a nonexistent root. In both experiments the interaction between condition and age was statistically significant. While older adults demonstrate preserved morphological parsing abilities, possible explanations for the interaction effect include cognitive slowing or deficient inhibitory control.