Department of Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences, University of Southern CaliforniaDepartment of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-MadisonInformation Resources and Technology, Stanford University.
Cogn Sci. 2006 Mar 4;30(2):311-45. doi: 10.1207/s15516709cog0000_46.
Older and younger adults' abilities to use context information rapidly during ambiguity resolution were investigated. In Experiments 1 and 2, younger and older adults heard ambiguous words (e.g., fires) in sentences where the preceding context supported either the less frequent or more frequent meaning of the word. Both age groups showed good context use in offline tasks, but only young adults demonstrated rapid use of context in cross-modal naming. A 3rd experiment demonstrated that younger and older adults had similar knowledge about the contexts used in Experiments 1 and 2. The experiment results were simulated in 2 computational models in which different patterns of context use were shown to emerge from varying a single speed parameter. These results suggest that age-related changes in processing efficiency can modulate context use during language comprehension.
本研究旨在探究年长和年轻成年人在解决歧义时快速利用上下文信息的能力。在实验 1 和实验 2 中，年轻和年长成年人在句子中听到歧义单词（例如 fires），句子的前语境支持该单词的不太常见或更常见的意思。两个年龄组在离线任务中都表现出良好的语境使用，但只有年轻成年人在跨模态命名中表现出快速使用语境的能力。第三个实验表明，年轻和年长成年人对实验 1 和实验 2 中使用的语境具有相似的知识。实验结果在 2 个计算模型中进行了模拟，其中通过改变单个速度参数显示出不同的语境使用模式。这些结果表明，处理效率的年龄相关变化可以调节语言理解过程中的语境使用。
