Contextual Constraints in Situation Model Construction: An Investigation of Age and Reading Span

Madden, Carol J.; Dijkstra, Katinka

doi:10.1080/13825580902927604

Cited by 22 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…In contrast, our findings that the effects of age on syntactic attachment were moderated by WM are consistent with a growing number of studies reporting larger influences of WM and attentional control on language processing among older adults compared to the young (Christianson et al, 2006; Federmeier, 2007; Kemtes & Kempler, 1997; Kemper & Herman, 2006; Kemper et al, 2010; Madden & Dijkstra, 2010; Stites, Federmeier, & Stine-Morrow, 2013). …”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

“…Just & Varma, 2002; MacDonald & Christiansen, 2002), and whether the impact of individual differences on attachment processing are exaggerated in older adulthood (cf. Kemtes & Kemper, 1997; Madden & Dijkstra, 2010). Critically, if individual differences in verbal working memory are a proxy for reading experience (MacDonald & Christiansen, 2002), we would expect performance on measures of print exposure and verbal working memory to have overlapping effects on on-line and off-line relative clause attachment.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Aging and individual differences in binding during sentence understanding: Evidence from temporary and global syntactic attachment ambiguities

et al. 2014

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We report an investigation of aging and individual differences in binding information during sentence understanding. An age-continuous sample of adults (N = 91), ranging from 18 to 81 years of age, read sentences in which a relative clause could be attached high to a head noun NP1, attached low to its modifying prepositional phrase NP2 (e.g., The son of the princess who scratched himself / herself in public was humiliated), or in which the attachment site of the relative clause was ultimately indeterminate (e.g., The maid of the princess who scratched herself in public was humiliated). Word-by-word reading times and comprehension (e.g., who scratched?) were measured. A series of mixed-effects models were fit to the data, revealing: (1) that, on average, NP1-attached sentences were harder to process and comprehend than NP2-attached sentences; (2) that these average effects were independently moderated by verbal working memory capacity and reading experience, with effects that were most pronounced in the oldest participants and; (3) that readers on average did not allocate extra time to resolve global ambiguities, though older adults with higher working memory span did. Findings are discussed in relation to current models of lifespan cognitive development, working memory, language experience, and the role of prosodic segmentation strategies in reading. Collectively, these data suggest that aging brings differences in sentence understanding, and these differences may depend on independent influences of verbal working memory capacity and reading experience.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aging and individual differences in binding during sentence understanding: Evidence from temporary and global syntactic attachment ambiguities

et al. 2014

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“…Both younger adults and older adults show this effect, at statistically equal magnitudes (Radvansky, Zwaan, Curiel, & Copeland, 2001), suggesting that there are no age differences in the quality of situation model updating. Other studies assessing working memory updating during narrative comprehension have shown that older adults can effectively update object representations (Radvansky, Copeland, Berish, & Dijkstra, 2003), integrate functional spatial information (Radvansky, Copeland, & Zwaan, 2003), update goal representations (Radvansky & Curiel, 1998), update spatial and temporal representations (Radvansky, Copeland, Berish, et al, 2003), and activate mental simulations (Dijkstra, Yaxley, Madden, & Zwaan, 2004;Madden & Dijkstra, 2010). (It should be noted, however, that there is some research showing that older adults have difficulty tracking multiple characters during comprehension (Noh & Stine-Morrow, 2009). )…”

Section: Narrative Comprehension and Agingmentioning

confidence: 96%

Aging and the segmentation of narrative film

Kurby

Asiala

Mills

2013

Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition

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The perception of event structure in continuous activity is important for everyday comprehension. Although the segmentation of experience into events is a normal concomitant of perceptual processing, previous research has shown age differences in the ability to perceive structure in naturalistic activity, such as a movie of someone washing a car. However, past research has also shown that older adults have a preserved ability to comprehend events in narrative text, which suggests that narrative may improve the event processing of older adults. This study tested whether there are age differences in event segmentation at the intersection of continuous activity and narrative: narrative film. Younger and older adults watched and segmented a narrative film, The Red Balloon, into coarse and fine events. Changes in situational features, such as changes in characters, goals, and objects predicted segmentation. Analyses revealed little age-difference in segmentation behavior. This suggests the possibility that narrative structure supports event understanding for older adults.

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“…Some researchers continued to argue that readers do automatically construct a full mental model of the events described by a text (the term “mental models” has been replaced in much current research by the term “situation models”; e.g., Graesser, Singer, & Trabasso, 1994; Long, Seely, & Oppy, 1996; Madden & Dijkstra, 2010; Morrow, et al, 1997; Radvansky & Copeland, 2006a, 2006b; Radvansky, Copeland, Berish, & Dijkstra, 2003; Radvansky, Copeland, & Zwaan, 2003; Radvansky & Curiel, 1998; Radvansky & Dijkstra, 2007; Radvansky et al, 2001; Singer, Graesser, & Trabasso, 1994; Stine-Morrow et al, 2004; Stine-Morrow et al, 1997, 2002; Suh & Trabasso, 1993; Zwaan, 2008; Zwaan, Langston, & Graesser, 1995; Zwaan, Magliano, & Graesser, 1995; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). In this body of research, predictive inferences have not been explicitly studied.…”

Section: What Kinds Of Elaborative Inferences Do Readers Generate?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The situation-model framework has guided many investigations of the effects of aging on inference (e.g., Madden & Dijkstra, 2010; Morrow et al, 1997; Radvansky, Copeland, & Zwaan, 2003; Radvansky, Copeland, Berish, & Dijkstra, 2003; Stine-Morrow et al, 2002, 2004; Radvansky, 1999). Radvansky and Dijkstra (2007) reviewed these studies and concluded that comprehension at the situation-model level is well preserved.…”

Section: How Does Aging Affect Inference Generation?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Aging and predicting inferences: A diffusion model analysis

McKoon

Ratcliff

2013

Journal of Memory and Language

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In the domain of discourse processing, it has been claimed that older adults (60-90-year-olds) are less likely to encode and remember some kinds of information from texts than young adults. The experiment described here shows that they do make a particular kind of inference to the same extent that college-age adults do. The inferences examined were “predictive” inferences such as the inference that something bad would happen to the actress for the sentence “The director and cameraman were ready to shoot close-ups when suddenly the actress fell from the 14th story” (McKoon & Ratcliff, 1986). Participants read sentences like the actress one and then later they were asked to decide whether words that expressed an inference (e.g., “dead”) had or had not appeared explicitly in a sentence. To directly compare older adults' performance to college-age adults' performance, we used a sequential sampling diffusion model (Ratcliff, 1978) to map response times and accuracy onto a single dimension of the strength with which an inference was encoded. On this dimension, there were no significant differences between the older and younger adults.

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Contextual Constraints in Situation Model Construction: An Investigation of Age and Reading Span

Cited by 22 publications

References 33 publications

Aging and individual differences in binding during sentence understanding: Evidence from temporary and global syntactic attachment ambiguities

Aging and individual differences in binding during sentence understanding: Evidence from temporary and global syntactic attachment ambiguities

Aging and the segmentation of narrative film

Aging and predicting inferences: A diffusion model analysis

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