Effects of animacy on processing relative clauses in older and younger adults

Abstract

Sentences with object relative clauses are more difficult to process than sentences with subject relative clauses, but the processing penalty associated with object relatives is greater when the sentential subject is an animate than when it is an inanimate noun. The present study tested the hypothesis that older adults are more sensitive to this type of semantic constraint than younger adults. Older and younger adults (n = 28 per group) participated in a self-paced listening study. The critical sentences contained subject and object relative clauses and had animate or inanimate subjects. Both older and younger adults had longer listening times for critical segments in object than in subject relative clause in both animacy conditions. Critically, the animacy manipulation disrupted older adults more than younger adults. These results are consistent with the claim that older adults rely on experience-based expectations to a greater extent than younger adults.

Keywords:

• Risky strategy hypothesis
• Sentence comprehension
• Ageing
• Constraint satisfaction
• Animacy

The author would like to thank Edwin Maas for comments on a previous version of this manuscript. Parts of this research were presented at the City University of New York (CUNY) Sentence Processing Conference, Columbia, South Carolina, March 2013.

Notes

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.

²Traxler et al. (2002) contained 28 quadruplets. Three sets were excluded because they contained vocabulary that overlapped with other experimental materials that were run concurrently with this experiment. In addition, two of the quadruplets developed by Traxler et al. (2002) were included in the study but were then omitted from data analysis due to a coding error in the experimental software. The frequency and length analyses are based on the 23 sets included in the final results.

³When the groups were analysed separately, younger adults showed effects of syntactic complexity and animacy at both the relative clause and main verbs. At the relative clause verb, the interaction between animacy and sentence type was significant in the younger adults, F(1, 27) = 10.30, p = .003. Tukey tests revealed effects of syntactic complexity in both animacy conditions. The effect of animacy was significant in object relatives but not in subject relatives. At the main verb, younger adults showed effects of syntactic complexity, F(1, 27) = 6.5, p = .02, and animacy, F(1, 27) = 5.6, p = .03, but the interaction did not reach significance, F(1, 27) = 3.3, p = .08. The difference between the analyses with and without group in the model probably reflects the additional variance introduced by including younger and older adults in one model and the fact that the effects were larger in the older than in the younger adults.