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

Abstract

The ability of older adults to comprehend sentences may decline due to the cognitive changes in working memory. Therefore, an increase in working memory demands during sentence comprehension would result in poorer performance among older adults. To test this hypothesis, the present study explored the effects of age and working memory load on sentence comprehension using a sentence-picture matching task. 35 older adults and 35 younger adults were required to match Mandarin passive sentences (high working memory load) and active sentences (low working memory load) with pictures. Passive sentences were found to be more difficult than active sentences for all participants. Older adults responded to passive sentences more slowly than younger adults. However, no significant age difference was found in accuracy of responses. Accuracy on the comprehension of passive sentences was marginally correlated with the effect of syntactic complexity among older adults. Compared with younger adults, older adults were more disrupted by the increased working memory load in the comprehension of passive sentences, but they can compensate for the decline in the accuracy of comprehension by spending extra time on sentences with higher working memory load.

Syntactic complexity differentially affects auditory sentence comprehension performance for individuals with age-related hearing loss

“…The most decreased performance on the sentence types with the highest computational load (e.g., passive) was significantly predicted by DS, followed by the IR. These results may imply that the underlying cognitive process engaged in the SCT ( Sung, 2015b ) predominantly relies on short-term memory system rather than long-term memory, aligning with prior aging studies that employed sentence-picture matching paradigms ( Schumacher et al, 2015 ; Sung, 2017 ; Liu, 2018 ; Sung et al, 2020 ). In contrast, DR exhibited no significant correlation with performance on passive sentences and did not emerge as a significant predictor.…”

A lifespan perspective of cognitive control involvement during language comprehension

“…Using a sentence-picture matching paradigm, Sung, Yoo, Lee, and Eom (2017) showed a similar pattern on a behavioral level. Indeed, in their study, older adults who exhibited poorer working memory performances had more difficulties processing non-canonical sentences (i.e., sentences in which the word order is uncommon) (see also, Liu, 2018). In an eyetracking study, Huettig and Janse (2016) showed that prediction in language processing was influenced by working memory and processing speed.…”