DeDe Gayle, Kelleher Denis
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Temple University.
J Neurolinguistics. 2021 Feb;57. doi: 10.1016/j.jneuroling.2020.100950. Epub 2020 Nov 18.
The present study examined how healthy aging and aphasia influence the capacity for readers to generate structural predictions during online reading, and how animacy cues influence this process. Non-brain-damaged younger (n =24) and older (n =12) adults (Experiment 1) and individuals with aphasia (IWA; n =11; Experiment 2) read subject relative and object relative sentences in an eye-tracking experiment. Half of the sentences included animate sentential subjects, and the other half included inanimate sentential subjects. All three groups used animacy information to mitigate effects of syntactic complexity. These effects were greater in older than younger adults. IWA were sensitive to structural frequency, with longer reading times for object relative than subject relative sentences. As in previous work, effects of structural complexity did not emerge on IWA's first pass through the sentence, but were observed when IWA reread critical segments of the sentences. Thus, IWA may adopt atypical reading strategies when they encounter low frequency or complex sentence structures, but they are able to use animacy information to reduce the processing disruptions associated with these structures.
本研究考察了健康衰老和失语症如何影响读者在在线阅读过程中生成结构预测的能力，以及有生命性线索如何影响这一过程。在一项眼动追踪实验中，未患脑损伤的年轻成年人（n = 24）和年长成年人（n = 12）（实验1）以及失语症患者（IWA；n = 11；实验2）阅读主语关系句和宾语关系句。一半的句子包含有生命的句子主语，另一半包含无生命的句子主语。所有三组都利用有生命性信息来减轻句法复杂性的影响。这些影响在年长成年人中比在年轻成年人中更大。IWA对结构频率敏感，阅读宾语关系句的时间比阅读主语关系句的时间更长。与之前的研究一样，结构复杂性的影响在IWA首次阅读句子时并未出现，但在IWA重新阅读句子的关键部分时被观察到。因此，IWA在遇到低频或复杂句子结构时可能会采用非典型的阅读策略，但他们能够利用有生命性信息来减少与这些结构相关的加工干扰。
