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

• Published in: Language and speech Vol. 49; no. 1; pp. 75 - 99
• Main Authors: Titone, Debra A., Koh, Christine K., Kjelgaard, Margaret M., Bruce, Stephanie, Speer, Shari R., Wingfield, Arthur
• Format: Journal Article Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.03.2006; Kingston Press Services; Sage Publications Ltd. (UK); Sage Publications Ltd
• 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; Massachusetts; Canada; syntactic ambiguity resolution; prosody; aging; Language comprehension; Prosody; Memory; Adult; Psycholinguistics; Syntax; Age; Ambiguity
• ISSN: 0023-8309; 1756-6053
• DOI: 10.1177/00238309060490010501

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.