Can a single adjective immediately influence message-building during sentence processing? We presented participants with 168 sentence contexts, such as "His skin was red from spending the day at the . . ." Sentences ended with either the most expected word ("beach") or a low cloze probability completion ("pool"). Nouns were preceded by adjectives that changed their relative likelihood (e.g., "neighborhood" increases the cloze probability of pool whereas "sandy" promotes beach). We asked if participants' online processing can be rapidly updated by the adjective, changing the resulting pattern of facilitation at the noun, and, if so, whether updates unfold symmetrically-not only increasing, but also decreasing, the fit of particular nouns. We measured event-related potentials (ERPs) to the adjective and the noun and modeled these with respect to (a) the overall amount of updating promoted by the adjective, (b) the preadjectival cloze probability of the noun and, (c) the amount of cloze probability change for the obtained noun after the adjective. Bayesian mixed-effects analysis of N400 amplitude at the noun revealed that adjectives rapidly influenced semantic processing of the noun, but did so asymmetrically, with positive updating (reducing N400 amplitudes) having a greater effect than negative updating (increasing N400s). At the adjective, the amount of (possible) updating was not associated with any discernible ERP modulation. Overall, these results suggest the information provided by adjectives is buffered until a head noun is encountered, at which point the access of the noun's semantics is shaped in parallel by both the adjective and the sentence-level representation.

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Successful communication is key to health in older age. This is true in the narrow sense of being able to gain critical information e.g., from health care providers, but also more broadly in being able to maintain social ties and pursue meaningful activities, which, in turn, are central to maintaining health and well-being. Compared to younger adults, older adults show both quantitative and qualitative changes in how information is processed and used over time to achieve comprehension. Such systematic age-related neural dissimilarities in processing dynamics and strategies raise fundamental questions about how the human brain supports cross-generational communication, especially in light of accumulating evidence linking interpersonal similarities in brain responses to communicative success. Yet despite its prevalence and tangible health-related importance, naturalistic intergenerational communication involving older adults is understudied. In this paper, we lay out why filling this research gap is critical in advancing our understanding of naturalistic communication, with implications for both science and practice.

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