Online grammaticality judgments in French young and older adults.

UNLABELLED

BACKGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT: A goal of language and aging research is to determine the nature of change in language-processing skills. In this study the authors examine the role of age and use of cues (e.g., word order, verbal agreement, sentence structure) on online sentence processing.

METHODS

French young and older adults were asked to detect grammatical violations in sentences as quickly as possible. Detection times were analyzed as a function of participants' age and sentence characteristics (i.e., violation type, span, and position).

RESULTS

Above and beyond main effects of participant's age and linguistic features, results showed age-related differences in effects of linguistic cues on sentence processing and important individual differences during aging in hierarchies of cue strength.

CONCLUSION

Young and older adults use similar linguistic cues in the online process, but loss of cognitive resources with age shows a cost of cue use and a greater use of context.