Abstract
The contribution of prosody to the interpretation of temporary syntactic ambiguity was examined for young and elderly listeners using a sentence - completion task . Temporary syntactic ambiguity refers to cases where it may be temporarily unclear whether a syntactic clause bound ary has or has not been reached based on what has been heard in the sentence to that point . Results suggest that both young and elderly adults use a computationally less demanding late - closure parsing strat egy whenever possible , but that sentence prosody can override this ten dency when an alternative closure position is clearly signaled . Although subtle differences appeared in regard to sentence completion strategies and latencies to completion , results suggest that efficient resolution of syntactic boundary uncertainty and effective use of sentence prosody are two features of language comprehension that remain well - preserved in normal aging .