Visual context benefits spoken sentence comprehension across the lifespan

Abstract

Evidence for age-related declines in syntactic comprehension is mixed, often modulated by concomitant cognitive changes. Further, while older (vs. younger) adults may make greater use of semantic information for sentence comprehension, it is unclear whether this extends to visual information. We investigated whether visual-scene depictions benefit sentence comprehension in adults with varying cognitive-ability levels. 153 participants (18–70 years) listened to German relative clauses with canonical/noncanonical structure (“This is the man who follows the woman”/“…whom the woman follows”) presented in isolation or alongside visual-scene depictions, and answered agent-identification questions. Visual-scene depictions facilitated comprehension, especially when individuals with lower cognitive-ability levels encountered noncanonical structures. Individual differences in cognitive ability tended to modulate age-related changes in comprehension of utterances presented in isolation. These findings indicate beneficial effects of visual information for thematic-role comprehension – especially when task demands are high – and that cognitive-ability levels may modulate age-related changes in comprehension.