Older Adults’ Comprehension of Transformational and Deactivation Negation

Abstract

The present research aimed to examine young and older adults’ comprehension of negated text to determine the locus of older adults’ difficulty in understanding this text construction. Participants were asked to read short passages at their own pace, complete a lexical decision task, and answer a comprehension question about what they had read. Older adults’ comprehension accuracy was lower than that of young adults for passages containing transformational negation. This suggests that limited working memory resources led to older adults’ difficulty with negation, not a difficulty with inhibition, as what would have been suggested with difficulties with deactivation negation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I thank Alison Sieck, Leighann Dudash, Casey Driscoll, and Michael Toland for their assistance in stimuli development and data collection. I also thank Natasha Snyder for her assistance in organizing materials and references for the writing of this manuscript.