Effects of age, working memory, and word order on passive-sentence comprehension: evidence from a verb-final language

Abstract

WM capacity effects on passive-sentence comprehension increased dramatically as people aged, suggesting that those who have larger WM capacity are less vulnerable to age-related changes in sentence-comprehension abilities. WM capacity may serve as a cognitive reserve associated with sentence-comprehension abilities for elderly adults.

Effects of Working Memory Load and Age on the Comprehension of Passive Sentences

“…This finding suggests that the two age groups displayed similar patterns of comprehension difficulty in all conditions regardless of WM load. This is inconsistent with Sung et al (2017)'s study which found that working memory had greater influence on the performance of individuals with advancing age. The inconsistency may derive from the different experimental stimuli used in the two studies.…”

“…Contrary to the study by Sung et al (2017), Hardy, Messenger and Maylor (2017) discovered that older and younger adults displayed similar priming effects in the production of passive sentences, which indicates that the ability of older adults to produce passive sentences was largely unaffected by aging. However, this study did not consider the working memory differences.…”

“…The inconsistency may derive from the different experimental stimuli used in the two studies. Sung et al (2017) used two types of Korean passive sentences with reversed order of grammatical subject and object (SOV vs.OSV) as the target structure. The subjects and objects in these passive sentences were all followed by case markers which provided important clues for the identification of the grammatical roles.…”

“…In this study, working memory was not taken into consideration and consequently, we are not sure whether the lack of significant age differences was related to the working memory capacity of the participants. Sung et al (2017) examined the effect of different WM loads on the processing of Korean passive sentences (canonical and non-canonical) among older and younger adults using a sentence comprehension task. The study found that sentences with canonical word order were easier to comprehend than sentences with non-canonical word order for all subjects regardless of their ages.…”

Syntax and working memory in typically-developing children

“…According to these authors, these results stem from the fact that producing accusative clitics involves retaining morphosyntactic information in memory while linking this information to two positions, the preverbal position where the clitic is 'spelled-out' after syntactic movement, and the canonical, postverbal position, and that this cognitive manipulation would be challenging for immature systems due to limited computational resources. Other constructions involving syntactic movement, such as passives, were also found to be linked to WM in DLD children with a listening recall task (Marinis & Saddy, 2013), and in adults with a composite measure of WM-capacity index (Sung, Yoo, Lee, & Eom, 2017). Mastery of such complex grammatical constructions also requires storing and manipulating verbal sequences, since "these structures require storing of the NPs of the sentence in memory before syntactically and semantically integrating with the verb phrase thanks to the cue provided by the passive morphology" (Durrleman, Delage, Prévost, & Tuller, 2017: 8).…”