Age-Related Changes in Sentence Production Abilities and Their Relation to Working-Memory Capacity: Evidence from a Verb-Final Language

Sung, Jee Eun

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0119424

Cited by 36 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…While no studies to date have examined age-related effects on onset latency priming, a few studies have investigated age effects on choice syntactic priming. However, this has produced mixed results with two studies finding preserved priming of passives in older adults (Hardy et al, 2017(Hardy et al, , 2019, while others have not (Heyselaar et al, 2017, footnote 2;Sung, 2015Sung, , 2016). 2 It is therefore difficult to make direct hypotheses about age-related effects on onset latency syntactic priming based on previous evidence.…”

Section: Experiments 1 Examining the Effect Of Aging On Latency Measurmentioning

confidence: 98%

Healthy Aging and Sentence Production: Disrupted Lexical Access in the Context of Intact Syntactic Planning

Hardy

Wheeldon

2020

Front. Psychol.

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Healthy aging does not affect all features of language processing equally. In this study, we investigated the effects of aging on different processes involved in fluent sentence production, a complex task that requires the successful execution and coordination of multiple processes. In Experiment 1, we investigated age-related effects on the speed of syntax selection using a syntactic priming paradigm. Both young and older adults produced target sentences quicker following syntactically related primes compared to unrelated primes, indicating that syntactic facilitation effects are preserved with age. In Experiment 2, we investigated age-related effects in syntactic planning and lexical retrieval using a planning scope paradigm: participants described moving picture displays designed to elicit sentences with either initial coordinate or simple noun phrases and, on half of the trials, the second picture was previewed. Without preview, both age groups were slower to initiate sentences with larger coordinate phrases, suggesting a similar phrasal planning scope. However, age-related differences did emerge relating to the preview manipulation: while young adults displayed speed benefits of preview in both phrase conditions, older adults only displayed speed preview benefits within the initial phrase (coordinate condition). Moreover, preview outside the initial phrase (simple condition) caused older adults to become significantly more error-prone. Thus, while syntactic planning scope appears unaffected by aging, older adults do appear to encounter problems with managing the activation and integration of lexical items into syntactic structures. Taken together, our findings indicate that healthy aging disrupts the lexical, but not the syntactic, processes involved in sentence production.

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Section: Experiments 1 Examining the Effect Of Aging On Latency Measurmentioning

confidence: 98%

Healthy Aging and Sentence Production: Disrupted Lexical Access in the Context of Intact Syntactic Planning

Hardy

Wheeldon

2020

Front. Psychol.

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“…It therefore remains unclear whether linguistic priming effects would continue to be observed in older adults in a task in which demands are increased (e.g., by manipulating the codability of the nouns). Moreover, the consideration of task demands vs. cognitive supply may also be necessary for clarifying the mixed findings within the existing choice syntactic priming and aging literature (Hardy et al, 2017;Heyselaar et al, 2017Heyselaar et al, , 2018Sung, 2015). There are minimal methodological differences between the various studies (e.g., all used a picture description production task); however, it remains possible that differences in the characteristics of the samples, such as education level and native language use, may have resulted in differences in processing efficiency of the older adult groups, leading to different behavioral findings between studies (Peelle, 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While no studies to date have examined agerelated effects on onset latency priming, a few studies have investigated age effects on choice syntactic priming. However, this has produced mixed results with two studies finding preserved priming of passives in older adults (Hardy, Messenger, & Maylor, 2017;Heyselaar, Wheeldon, & Segaert, 2018), while others have not (Heyselaar, Segaert, Walvoort, Kessels, & Hagoort, 2017, footnote 2;Sung, 2015). 2 It is therefore difficult to make direct hypotheses about age-related effects on onset latency syntactic priming based on previous evidence.…”

Section: Examining the Effect Of Aging On Latency Measures Of Syntax mentioning

confidence: 99%

Healthy Ageing and Sentence Production: Disrupted Lexical Access in the Context of Intact Syntactic Planning

Hardy

Wheeldon

2018

Preprint

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Sentence production requires rapid syntax generation and word retrieval. We investigated how healthy ageing affects these processes. In Experiment 1, syntactic priming significantly facilitated sentence production speed for both young and older adults. In Experiment 2, participants produced sentences with initial coordinate or simple phrases (e.g., the owl and the car move above the harp/the owl moves above the car and the harp); on half the trials, the second picture (car) was previewed. Without preview, both age groups were slower to initiate sentences with larger coordinate phrases, suggesting a similar planning scope. Young adults displayed speed benefits of preview both within and outside the initial phrase; however, older adults only displayed speed preview benefits within the initial phrase, and preview outside the initial phrase significantly increased error rates. Thus, syntactic planning scope appears unaffected by age, but there is age-related decline in the integration of lexical items into syntactic structures.

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“…Our motivation for examining the nominative-initial preference in Korean came from evidence regarding aging populations. Previous studies consistently reported that elderly adults demonstrated greater difficulties in non-nominative-initial word-order than nominative-initial structures across modalities; including a sentence comprehension task using a pictogram-based sentence-picture paradigm with full case markings (Sung, 2015a;2017), a sentence production task (Sung, 2015b), and a case marker processing task (Sung, 2017). The consistent findings that, despite the freedom of word order in Korean, normal elderly adults have greater difficulties with non-nominative-initial Because previous studies have showed that Korean-speaking elderly adults have more difficulty comprehending passive sentences than active sentences (Sung, 2015a(Sung, , 2017, we also manipulated the syntactic voice of sentences to present active and passive verbal forms following the NPs.…”

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confidence: 99%

Aging-Related Differences in the Resolution of Ambiguity from Case Marker Deletions in a Verb-Final Language

Sung

Lee

Eom³

2019

Commun Sci Disord

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Objectives: This study investigated how age differences impact the resolution of syntactic ambiguities arising through the manipulation of verb voice types and the number of noun phrases (NPs) in stimuli sets. The stimuli consisted of ambiguous sentences that we created by deleting case markers in Korean sentences. We examined resolution strategies from the viewpoint of the nominative-initial preference. Methods: A total of 105 Korean-speaking individuals participated in the study (young adults 49, old adults 56). We manipulated the number of NPs (1 vs. 2) and the verb voice types (active vs. passive) in morphologically ambiguous sentences with NPs that had no case markers. We administered a picture-selection task to examine this nominative-initial preference. Results: We found significant differences in the use of the nominative-initial strategy between the two age groups. Younger adults consistently demonstrated a preference for the nominative-initial strategy across conditions. In contrast, elderly adults presented less preference for the nominative-initial strategy than the younger adults. Conclusion: These findings indicate that elderly adults performed significantly differently in the engagement of the more frequently used syntactic template-based strategy (nominative-initial strategy) than younger adults when resolving syntactic ambiguity. The differences between the age groups in ambiguity resolution strategy may explain aging-related declines in sentence comprehension abilities. Sentence comprehension is a complex process in which listenersand readers absorb linguistic information at multiple levels, including but not limited to syntactic and semantic units. When linguistic information is insufficient in a given context, people encounter ambiguity (Bader, 1997). In auditory sentence comprehension, listeners must employ various strategies to resolve ambiguities and understand the sentences they hear. Psycholinguistic researchers have long sought to identify the underlying reasons for individual differences in ambiguity resolution. The linguistic sources that induce syntactic ambiguities may vary across the languag-es. Some languages, such as English, that focus on word order in syntactic resolution display ambiguities in garden-path sentences that prevent listeners from performing linear processing for comprehension. However, languages such as Korean that has a relative freedom in the word order have different sources from English when processing syntactically ambiguous sentences.As shown in (A in Box 1), Korean is a verb-final language that overtly case marks noun phrases (NPs) (Sohn, 2001). These NPs can be scrambled as long as predicates are placed at the end of sentences (B in Box 1). Case is not overtly marked in English-type

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Age-Related Changes in Sentence Production Abilities and Their Relation to Working-Memory Capacity: Evidence from a Verb-Final Language

Cited by 36 publications

References 31 publications

Healthy Aging and Sentence Production: Disrupted Lexical Access in the Context of Intact Syntactic Planning

Healthy Aging and Sentence Production: Disrupted Lexical Access in the Context of Intact Syntactic Planning

Healthy Ageing and Sentence Production: Disrupted Lexical Access in the Context of Intact Syntactic Planning

Aging-Related Differences in the Resolution of Ambiguity from Case Marker Deletions in a Verb-Final Language

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