Inhibition in the Processing of Garden-Path Sentences

The Hartman and Hasher (1991) garden-path sentence completion task has been used in several studies to assess the efficiency of the deletion function of inhibition (e.g., L. Hasher, R. Zacks, & C. P. May, 1999 ), with results suggesting that younger adults are efficient at suppressing once relev...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Psychology and aging 1999-06, Vol.14 (2), p.304-313
Main Authors: May, Cynthia P, Zacks, Rose T, Hasher, Lynn, Multhaup, Kristi S
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Adult. Elderly
Age Differences
Aged
Aging - psychology
Biological and medical sciences
Cognition
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive Processes
Cues
Developmental psychology
Distraction
Efficiency
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Human
Humans
Inhibition (Psychology)
Inhibitory processes
Learning
Male
Measures
Memory
Mental Processes
Middle Aged
Models, Psychological
Priming
Psychological Tests
Psychology
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Semantics
Sentence Completion Tests
Sentence Comprehension
Sentence Structure
Signal Detection, Psychological
Task Complexity
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Summary:The Hartman and Hasher (1991) garden-path sentence completion task has been used in several studies to assess the efficiency of the deletion function of inhibition (e.g., L. Hasher, R. Zacks, & C. P. May, 1999 ), with results suggesting that younger adults are efficient at suppressing once relevant but no longer appropriate information, whereas older adults generally are not (e.g., M. Hartman & L. Hasher, 1991 ; L. Hasher, M. B. Quig, & C. P. May, 1997 ; C. P. May & L. Hasher, 1998 ). An alternative interpretation of patterns of access to relevant and no-longer-relevant sentence endings focuses on the difficulty of selecting final words for sentence frames and on integration effects in implicit memory ( M. Hartman, 1995 ). This alternative is considered and found wanting on the basis of both new and old empirical data. On the basis of present data and related findings, it is concluded that the task does measure inhibitory efficiency.
ISSN:0882-7974
1939-1498
DOI:10.1037/0882-7974.14.2.304