Effects of Age and Working Memory Load on Syntactic Processing: An Event-Related Potential Study

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
Graciela C Alatorre-CruzJavier Sanchez-Lopez

Abstract

Cognitive changes in aging include working memory (WM) decline, which may hamper language comprehension. An increase in WM demands in older adults would probably provoke a poorer sentence processing performance in this age group. A way to increase the WM load is to separate two lexical units in an agreement relation (i.e., adjective and noun), in a given sentence. To test this hypothesis, event-related potentials (ERPs) were collected from Spanish speakers (30 older adults, mean age = 66.06 years old; and 30 young adults, mean age = 25.7 years old) who read sentences to detect grammatical errors. The sentences varied with regard to (1) the gender agreement of the noun and adjective, where the gender of the adjective either agreed or disagreed with the noun, and (2) the WM load (i.e., the number of words between the noun and adjective in the sentence). No significant behavioral differences between groups were observed in the accuracy of the response, but older adults showed longer reaction times regardless of WM load condition. Compared with young participants, older adults showed a different pattern of ERP components characterized by smaller amplitudes of LAN, P600a, and P600b effects when the WM load was increased. A smaller L...Continue Reading

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Citations

Dec 7, 2019·Neuropsychology, Development, and Cognition. Section B, Aging, Neuropsychology and Cognition·Joenilton Saturnino Cazé Da SilvaBernardino Fernández-Calvo
Sep 30, 2020·PloS One·Graciela C Alatorre-CruzThalía Fernández
Aug 6, 2019·Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience·Caroline BeeseLars Meyer
Jun 20, 2020·Neuropsychologia·Charlotte PoulisseKatrien Segaert
Apr 4, 2021·Brain Sciences·Gabriela Gutiérrez-Zamora VelascoSusana A Castro-Chavira

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