Agreement processing and attraction errors in aging: evidence from subject-verb agreement in German

ABSTRACT

Effects of aging on lexical processing are well attested, but the picture is less clear for grammatical processing. Where age differences emerge, these are usually ascribed to working-memory (WM) decline. Previous studies on the influence of WM on agreement computation have yielded inconclusive results, and work on aging and subject-verb agreement processing is lacking. In two experiments (Experiment 1: timed grammaticality judgment, Experiment 2: self-paced reading + WM test), we investigated older (OA) and younger (YA) adults’ susceptibility to agreement attraction errors. We found longer reading latencies and judgment reaction times (RTs) for OAs. Further, OAs, particularly those with low WM scores, were more accepting of sentences with attraction errors than YAs. OAs showed longer reading latencies for ungrammatical sentences, again modulated by WM, than YAs. Our results indicate that OAs have greater difficulty blocking intervening nouns from interfering with the computation of agreement dependencies. WM can modulate this effect.

KEYWORDS:

• Subject-verb agreement
• attraction errors
• aging
• grammaticality judgment
• self-paced reading

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the people who participated in the experiments as well as to three anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. This work was supported by an Alexander-von-Humboldt-Professorship awarded to Harald Clahsen.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

for accuracy rates and logtransformed

Notes

1. In addition to the experimental items, we further analyzed the grammatically correct filler items to ensure that an effect of verb number was not due to plural forms simply being more difficult to process. We did not find any main effects of age (z = 1.05, ns) or verb number (z = 1.36, ns), or an interaction between age and verb number (z = 1.32, ns) on filler accuracy rates.

2. Note that for easier illustration, working memory was dichotomized for the graphs (Figures 3 and 6) by way of a Median split. All analyses treat working-memory score as a continuous factor, however.

3. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung.