Language and Aging☆

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

“…participants only needed to dedicate minimal cognitive resources to syntactic selection (because we removed the choice element) and we did not manipulate the ease of lexical encoding. According to Peelle (2019), the relationship between cognitive supply and task demands would still therefore have been balanced in favor of good behavioral performance in older adults, despite likely declines in overall cognitive capacity. 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). Unfortunately, this information is unavailable for previous studies, meaning such a comparison is not possible.…”

“…Nevertheless, older adults have a wealth of experience with language and are often able to adopt effective processing strategies, such as the recruitment of addition brain areas, to compensate for lost efficiency elsewhere (Reuter-Lorenz & Park, 2014;Wingfield & Grossman, 2006). This paints a multifactorial picture of language processing in old age in which some language skills decline because of age-related cognitive changes, but in which others are preserved because of the successful adoption of compensation strategies (for reviews, Burke & Shafto, 2008;Peelle, 2019). Investigating how different aspects of language processing are affected by old age is critical for understanding this complex balance between decline and preservation.…”

“…Moreover, in situations in which the task demands are reduced, minimal age differences are found; for example, Kemper, Herman, and Lian (2003) found that young and older adults produced similar responses when asked to incorporate intransitive ('smiled') or transitive ('replaced') verbs into their sentences, and age differences in fluency only emerged when participants were asked to incorporate more complex complement-taking verbs ('expected'). This effect of task complexity on language production skills in old age can be best explained by Peelle's (2019) 'supply and demand' framework, which suggests that behavioral success reflects a complex balance between specific task requirements and the level of cognitive resources available to the speaker; specifically, if task requirements outweigh cognitive resources, processing efficiency will decline leading to poor performance.…”

“…We included these measures because there is widespread variation in the type and extent of cognitive and neuroanatomical changes that occur with healthy aging (Salthouse, 2012(Salthouse, , 2016Ziegler, Dahnke, & Gaser, 2012). This increase in heterogeneity with age means that all older adults are unlikely to adopt the same compensation strategies or perform exactly same way in any given language production task (Peelle, 2019). Investigating what kind of inter-individual variability accounts for individual differences in language performance is therefore an important consideration when aiming to fully understand the complex balance between decline and preservation in old age.…”