Age-Related Impairments in the Revision of Syntactic Misanalyses: Effects of Prosody

Two experiments examined whether young and older adults differ in comprehending sentences that contain temporary syntactic closure ambiguities. Experiment 1 examined age-related differences using the Auditory Moving Window (AMW) task, in which sentences were presented in a segment-by-segment self-pa...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Language and speech 2006-03, Vol.49 (1), p.75-99
Main Authors: Titone, Debra A., Koh, Christine K., Kjelgaard, Margaret M., Bruce, Stephanie, Speer, Shari R., Wingfield, Arthur
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Adults
Age Differences
Aged
Aged, 80 and over
Aging
Aging (Individuals)
Aging - physiology
Ambiguity
Cognition & reasoning
Comprehension
Eye Movements
Health aspects
Hearing disorders
Humans
Inhibition
Language
Language processing
Linguistics
Massachusetts
Memory
Mental Recall
Nouns
Older Adults
Older people
Oral Language
Production and comprehension processes
Prosody
Psycholinguistics
Psychology of language
Reaction Time
Reading Comprehension
Recall
Recall (Psychology)
Semantics
Sentences
Short Term Memory
Speech Perception - physiology
Spoken language
Structural Linguistics
Studies
Syntactic structures
Syntax
Syntax phonology relationship
Verbs
Young Adults
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Summary:Two experiments examined whether young and older adults differ in comprehending sentences that contain temporary syntactic closure ambiguities. Experiment 1 examined age-related differences using the Auditory Moving Window (AMW) task, in which sentences were presented in a segment-by-segment self-paced fashion. Experiment 2 examined age-related differences using a sentence recall task, in which sentences were presented in their entirety. Sentences were constructed to have cooperating prosody (i.e., where prosody is consistent with the syntactic boundaries), baseline prosody (i.e., where prosody is ambiguous in the syntactically ambiguous region), and conflicting prosody (i.e., where cross-splicing relocates the prosodic phrase break at a misleading point in syntactic structure). The results showed that both young and older adults make comparable use of prosodic information to interpret temporary syntactic ambiguities, although younger adults may make use of this information more quickly than older adults. In addition, older adults appeared to be less able than young adults to revise initial syntactic misinterpretations caused by conflicting prosodic information. These results are interpreted with respect to age-related impairments in the allocation of working memory resources and inefficient inhibitory function during spoken language processing.
ISSN:0023-8309
1756-6053
DOI:10.1177/00238309060490010501