Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Taiwan University.
Graduate Institute of Brain and Mind Sciences, National Taiwan University.
Psychol Aging. 2024 May;39(3):275-287. doi: 10.1037/pag0000775. Epub 2023 Aug 31.
This study aimed to investigate how age affects the ability to comprehend sentence meaning, specifically how individuals resolve pronouns to their corresponding nouns. The study included 34 young participants (20-29 years old) and 34 older participants (60-81 years old). The participants were presented with sentences containing two characters and a third-person singular pronoun. Stereotypical genders associated with character names were manipulated such that the pronoun had either one, two, or no possible antecedents, rendering the pronoun referentially unambiguous, ambiguous, or mismatched, respectively. Consistent with the prior findings on preserved syntactic processing with advanced age, event-related potential data time-locked to the critical pronouns showed a P600 effect to mismatched pronouns regardless of age. These results indicate that older adults, like their younger counterparts, have a strong preference for readily available antecedents. When the pronoun was ambiguous, younger adults showed a typical Nref effect-a sustained anterior negativity associated with elaborative inferencing to search for the referent. Older adults did not exhibit this effect, suggesting a reduction in elaborative processes for establishing coherence. Nevertheless, the Nref response to ambiguous pronouns was observed in a subset of older adults, who also showed a Nref instead of P600 response to mismatched pronouns. Overall, individuals who elicited the Nref response to ambiguous pronouns were associated with a higher level of print exposure, suggesting that life-long reading experience may help to counteract age-related decline. Together, these findings help characterize the differential effects of aging on pronominal understanding and provide initial electrophysiological evidence of the protective benefit of print exposure on language processing in the aging population. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
本研究旨在探讨年龄如何影响理解句子意义的能力，特别是个体如何将代词与其对应的名词联系起来。研究包括 34 名年轻参与者（20-29 岁）和 34 名老年参与者（60-81 岁）。参与者被呈现包含两个字符和一个第三人称单数代词的句子。与字符名称相关的典型性别被操纵，使得代词有一个、两个或没有可能的先行词，分别使代词在指代上变得明确、不明确或不匹配。与年龄较大的个体在句法处理方面保留的先前发现一致，与关键代词同步的事件相关电位数据显示，无论年龄大小，不匹配的代词都会产生 P600 效应。这些结果表明，老年人与年轻人一样，更倾向于使用现成的先行词。当代词不明确时，年轻参与者表现出典型的 Nref 效应——与详尽推理相关的持续前负性，以寻找指代。老年人没有表现出这种效应，表明在建立连贯性时，详尽推理过程减少。然而，在一部分老年参与者中观察到了对不明确代词的 Nref 反应，他们也对不匹配的代词表现出 Nref 而不是 P600 的反应。总体而言，对不明确代词产生 Nref 反应的个体与较高的印刷品接触水平相关，这表明终身阅读经验可能有助于抵消与年龄相关的衰退。这些发现有助于描述年龄对代词理解的不同影响，并为印刷品接触对老龄化人口语言处理的保护作用提供了初步的电生理证据。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2024 APA，保留所有权利）。
