Liu Xinmiao, Wang Wenbin, Wang Haiyan
School of English for Specific Purposes, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing, China.
National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing, China.
PeerJ. 2019 Feb 14;7:e6437. doi: 10.7717/peerj.6437. eCollection 2019.
Animate nouns are preferred for grammatical subjects, whereas inanimate nouns are preferred for grammatical objects. Animacy provides important semantic cues for sentence comprehension. However, how individuals' ability to use this animacy cue changes with advancing age is still not clear. The current study investigated whether older adults and younger adults were differentially sensitive to this semantic constraint in processing Mandarin relative clauses, using a self-paced reading paradigm. The sentences used in the study contained subject relative clauses or object relative clauses and had animate or inanimate subjects. The results indicate that the animacy manipulation affected the younger adults more than the older adults in online processing. Younger adults had longer reading times for all segments in subject relative clauses than in object relative clauses when the subjects were inanimate, whereas there was no significant difference in reading times between subject and object relative clauses when the subjects were animate. In the older group, animacy was not found to influence the processing difficulty of subject relative clauses and object relative clauses. Compared with younger adults, older adults were less sensitive to animacy constraints in relative clause processing. The findings indicate that the use of animacy cues became less efficient in the ageing population. The results can be explained by the capacity constrained comprehension theory, according to which older adults have greater difficulty in integrating semantic information with syntactic processing due to the lack of sufficient cognitive resources.
有生命的名词更适合作为语法主语，而无生命的名词更适合作为语法宾语。生命性为句子理解提供了重要的语义线索。然而，个体运用这种生命性线索的能力如何随年龄增长而变化仍不明确。本研究采用自定步速阅读范式，调查了老年人和年轻人在处理汉语关系从句时对这种语义限制的敏感度是否存在差异。研究中使用的句子包含主语关系从句或宾语关系从句，且主语有生命或无生命。结果表明，在在线处理过程中，生命性操作对年轻人的影响大于老年人。当主语无生命时，年轻人阅读主语关系从句中所有片段的时间比阅读宾语关系从句的时间长，而当主语有生命时，主语关系从句和宾语关系从句的阅读时间没有显著差异。在老年组中，未发现生命性会影响主语关系从句和宾语关系从句的处理难度。与年轻人相比，老年人在关系从句处理中对生命性限制不太敏感。研究结果表明，在老年人群中，生命性线索的使用效率降低。这些结果可以用容量受限的理解理论来解释，根据该理论，由于缺乏足够的认知资源，老年人在将语义信息与句法处理整合方面有更大的困难。
