Effects of animacy on processing relative clauses in older and younger adults

Abstract

Sentences with object relative clauses are more difficult to process than sentences with subject relative clauses, but the processing penalty associated with object relatives is greater when the sentential subject is an animate than when it is an inanimate noun. The present study tested the hypothesis that older adults are more sensitive to this type of semantic constraint than younger adults. Older and younger adults (n = 28 per group) participated in a self-paced listening study. The critical sentences contained subject and object relative clauses and had animate or inanimate subjects. Both older and younger adults had longer listening times for critical segments in object than in subject relative clause in both animacy conditions. Critically, the animacy manipulation disrupted older adults more than younger adults. These results are consistent with the claim that older adults rely on experience-based expectations to a greater extent than younger adults.

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

“…This inconsistency may be the result of differences in the type of effect. The positive relationship identified in the present research was associated with effects of syntactic complexity, while the negative relationship discovered by DeDe (2015) was related with effects of animacy configuration.…”

Individual Differences in Peripheral Hearing and Cognition Reveal Sentence Processing Differences in Healthy Older Adults

“…All in all, there is ample cross-sectional evidence for between-group differences in language comprehension between younger and older adults. These mostly emerge not with simple language material, but when language material becomes more difficult to process (e.g., including double negation, comparatives, and doubly embedded relative clause sentences; Obler et al, 1991 , syntactically ambiguous garden-path sentences; Kemper et al, 2004 ; Christianson et al, 2006 , or non-prototypical animacy configurations; DeDe, 2015 ).…”

“…Most of the studies investigating relationships between language comprehension, syntactical processing, and aging have compared subject- and object-relative clause comprehension (Wingfield et al, 2006 ; Amichetti et al, 2016 ; DeCaro et al, 2016 ). However, a considerable amount of evidence points to object-relative clauses not being more difficult to process than subject-relative clauses per se , but only when a certain animacy configuration is present, namely, when the subject of the main clause is animate and the subject of the object-relative clause is inanimate (Weckerly and Kutas, 1999 ; Traxler et al, 2002 ; DeDe, 2015 ). Therefore, we based our second paradigm on Traxler et al's ( 2002 ) object-relative clause design with an animacy manipulation.…”

“…To measure processing difficulties, previous studies employed methods of either response accuracy (comprehension questions; Wingfield et al, 2006 ; Amichetti et al, 2016 ; DeCaro et al, 2016 ), or reading/listening times (eye-tracking; Traxler et al, 2002 , and self-paced listening; DeDe, 2015 ). Because we aimed for auditory presentation of our stimuli (thereby excluding reading measures), and because the RRC paradigm allowed for probing sentential processing at multiple points in time (thereby excluding end-of-sentence behavioral comprehension measures), we chose event-related potentials (ERPs) as our online sentence processing markers of choice.…”

When Couches Have Eyes: The Effect of Visual Context on Children's Reference Processing

“…More relevant to the present study, object relatives like There is the snake/carrot that the bunny found tend to show a processing cost compared to subject relatives (Gordon et al, 2001(Gordon et al, , 2002Traxler et al, 2002Traxler et al, , 2005. However, object relatives become easier to process when the head noun is inanimate than when it is animate (e.g., Ford, 1983;King and Just, 1991;Trueswell et al, 1994;Mak et al, 2002;Traxler et al, 2002;Clifton et al, 2003;Lowder and Gordon, 2014), with older adults showing this advantage more strongly than younger adults (DeDe, 2015) Children are sensitive to animacy during language processing from an early age. Although English-speaking children rely strongly on word order to guide their interpretation of whodid-what-to-whom in standard Subject-Verb-Object sentences, animacy influences interpretations when word order is less available as a cue -such as for young children or noncanonical word orders (e.g., Bates et al, 1984;Thal and Flores, 2001).…”