Aging - Syntax Flashcards
Wingfield, Peelle, & Grossman, 2003
• In a cross-sectional study of the interactions between syntax and rate of speech, older adults were less accurate than younger adults overall. Older adult’s accuracy declined sooner as a function of speech rate than younger adults. In reaction time data, older adults were slower providing responses for syntactically complex sentences, regardless of speech rate. Additionally, the difference in RTs for SR to OR sentences were exaggerated in older adults
Steinhauer, Abada, Pauker, Itzhak, & Baum, 2010
• In an ERP study, older adults were more likely to judge sentences that contained prosody-syntax mismatches and well-formed sentences as both acceptable – they identified mismatches, but were more likely to accept them than younger adults
However, ERP components show that older adults integrate prosodic information in a similar manner as younger adults, despite the off-line behavioral difference
Antonenko et al. 2013
• In a sentence-picture matching task, older adults exhibited lower accuracy and longer RTs to syntactically complex sentences compared to younger adults
Caplan, Dede, Waters, Michaud, & Tripodis, 2011
• In a reading study of sentences with relative clauses, older adults showed decreased accuracy and longer online reading times of syntactically complex verbs than younger adults. No evidence of speed/accuracy trade-off, as longer online reading times of verbs was still associated with decreased accuracy
Waters & Caplan 2003
o Using an auditory-moving-window paradigm with end-of-sentence plausibility judgment, there were no differential age-effects seen in increased reading times for 2 out of 3 simple-complex sentence pairs. Only difference in in cleft-object vs. cleft-subject sentences, authors attribute this to increased load in assigning 2 thematic roles, not syntax, per se. In general (besides one exception), there were no relationships between online measures and speed of processing measures. Offline, older adults were less accurate in responses to cleft-object sentences than younger adults. (Waters & Caplan 2003)
Kemper & Liu, 2007
• In an eyetracking reading study, older adults made more regressions (leading to increased regression path fixation times and total fixation times) when reading cleft object sentences compared to cleft-subject sentences. Older adults also experienced more difficulty reading cleft and relative clause sentences with temporary syntactic ambiguities. Regression analysis linked smaller WM capacities to more regressions and longer fixation times on cleft object versus cleft subject sentences
Piquado, Isaacowitz, & Wingfield, 2010
o Older adults did not show differences in pupil responses to syntactically complex sentences in a pupillometry study, even when pupillary responses were corrected for age
Kemper, Thompson, & Marquis, 2001
• In a longitudinal study, age-related declines in grammatical complexity in spoken responses to topics (indexed by D-Level, which is sensitive to amount/type of embeddings used to create complex sentences) were observed in healthy older adults, and individuals with dementia
Kemper, Granier, Marquis, Preovost, & Mitzner, 2001
• In a longitudinal study, grammatical complexity and idea density (average number of propositions per 10 words) declined with age in written autobiographical samples
Kemper, Herman, & Lian 2004
• In a constrained production task, older adults responses were shorter, less elaborate, and contained more errors when they were given 4 words to compose a sentence (no age differences found when given 2 or 3 words). When given complement-taking verbs, younger adults produced complex sentences, whereas older adults produced simpler, less complex sentences. Overall, older adults responded slower than younger adults
Davidson, Zacks, & Ferreira, 2003
o In a sentence production task where participants were provided with a subject pronouns and verb that allowed for two acceptable grammatical orderings rather than one, both younger and older adults were faster for sentences with only one possibility. Older adults were just as fast and accurate as younger, and showed a similar effect of grammatical choice
Nippold, Cramond, & Hayward-Nayhew, 2014
o In a study of the use of complex syntax in spoken discourse, older adults did not differ on measures of syntactic complexity compared to younger adults
