Davidson Douglas J, Zacks Rose T, Ferreira Fernanda
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA.
J Psycholinguist Res. 2003 Sep;32(5):541-66. doi: 10.1023/a:1025402517111.
Two experiments are reported on the influence of cognitive aging on grammatical choice in language production. In both experiments, participants from two age-groups (young and old) produced sentences in a formulation task (V. Ferreira, 1996) that contrasted conditions allowing a choice between alternative sentence arrangements (i.e., double object or prepositional dative) or that permitted no choice (i.e., prepositional dative only). Experiment 1 showed that older adults were able to formulate the alternative sentence arrangements with the same speed and fluency as young adults. Experiment 2 showed that cueing attention to one of the two object nouns to be included in the sentence resulted in the earlier expression of the cued noun in choice conditions, but with little evidence of a response time or dysfluency cost in the no-choice condition. As in Experiment 1, there were no substantive age differences in latencies or dysfluencies. These results support existing models for the mechanisms that choose between grammatical alternatives and bind phrases to available argument positions and provide evidence that older adults are not impaired in their use of these mechanisms.
本文报告了两项关于认知老化对语言产出中语法选择影响的实验。在这两项实验中，来自两个年龄组（年轻人和老年人）的参与者在一个句式任务中造句（V. 费雷拉，1996），该任务对比了允许在不同句子结构（即双宾语或介词与格）之间进行选择的条件，以及不允许选择的条件（即仅介词与格）。实验1表明，老年人能够以与年轻人相同的速度和流畅性造出不同的句子结构。实验2表明，提示注意句子中要包含的两个宾语名词之一，会导致在选择条件下被提示名词更早出现，但在无选择条件下几乎没有反应时间或流畅性代价的证据。与实验1一样，在潜伏期或流畅性方面没有实质性的年龄差异。这些结果支持了现有的关于在语法选项之间进行选择并将短语绑定到可用论元位置的机制的模型，并提供了证据表明老年人在使用这些机制方面没有受损。
