Aging and the use of sentential structure to facilitate word recognition.

The ability of younger adults (mean age = 35.4 years) and older adults (mean age = 74.12 years) to use syntactic-semantic structure to identify words was examined by presenting word strings in random order and sentence order at subnormal speech rate, and at the speech reception threshold of the participant. Significant facilitation of word recognition occurred in the sentence strings in both age groups. Further, although the younger participants recognized more words in both the scrambled and sentences strings than the elderly, there was no significant difference in the percent benefit to word recognition in the sentence strings. The total pattern of results suggests that the deficit in the elderly participants was due either to age differences in memory and attention, high frequency hearing loss, response bias, or the application by the younger participants of linguistic rules not directly deriving from the presence of sentential structure.