Sentence Comprehension in Older Adults: Evidence for Risky Processing Strategies

Abstract

Background/Study Context: Previous research has suggested that older adults compensate for age-related declines in sentence comprehension ability by reading more slowly. The purpose of this study was to investigate the hypothesis that older adults adopt a riskier strategy than younger adults, in which they rely on expectations based on probabilistic cues.

Methods: Older and younger adults read late closure sentences in a self-paced reading task (e.g., “When the waiter served the woman the food was still too hot.”). The subordinate verbs varied in whether or not they occurred in ditransitive constructions (served vs. kissed).

Results: Older adults showed less evidence of processing disruptions at the ambiguous noun phrase (the food) than younger adults. At the main verb, the older and younger adults showed evidence of processing disruption in the same conditions, but the processing disruptions were greater in older adults.

Conclusion: The results are interpreted as support for the hypothesis that older adults adopt “risky” strategies during sentence comprehension.

Notes

1. ¹Note that here, and throughout the paper, the term “strategy” is meant to indicate that the reader is unconsciously implementing a set of processes in order to build a mental representation of the sentence.

2. ²In some cases, the sentence may be disambiguated prior to the main verb. For example, in 1c the implausibility of “the girl” as the object of “scratched” is likely to disambiguate the sentence. However, the main verb is called the point of disambiguation because at this point in the sentence, the syntactic structure of the sentence is clear regardless of other cues (punctuation, plausibility, verb bias, etc.).

3. ³Note that younger adults might be expected to show the pattern of reading times ascribed to the risky strategy hypothesis (cf. Staub, 2007). Critically, the risky strategy hypothesis predicts that older adults’ reading times should be more influenced by probabilistic cues such as verb bias.