ERIC Number: EJ1412500
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2024
Pages: 10
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1092-4388
EISSN: EISSN-1558-9102
Coordinating Words and Sentences: Detecting Age-Related Changes in Language Production
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, v67 n1 p211-220 2024
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine whether older adults exhibit reduced abilities in coordinating lexical retrieval and syntactic formulation during sentence production and whether an individual's working memory capacity predicts age-related changes in sentence production. Method: A total of 124 Korean-speaking individuals (79 young and 45 older adults) completed a lexical priming sentence production task. The participants described a target picture (a dog biting a monkey) after reading either an agent (dog) or a theme (monkey) prime word. The proportion of passive sentences was used as the dependent variable. Results: When the theme noun was primed, older adults produced fewer passive sentences than young adults. Working memory tasks significantly predicted individual differences in the sentence production of older adults. Conclusions: With aging, the ability to efficiently formulate syntactic structures in coordination with varying lexical information declines. Among older adults, age-related changes in these sentence production processes are associated with reduced working memory. Our constrained language production task is sensitive to detecting aging effects.
Descriptors: Older Adults, Language Processing, Sentences, Short Term Memory, Task Analysis, Semantics, Age Differences, Foreign Countries
American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. 2200 Research Blvd #250, Rockville, MD 20850. Tel: 301-296-5700; Fax: 301-296-8580; e-mail: slhr@asha.org; Web site: http://jslhr.pubs.asha.org
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) (DHHS/NIH)
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: South Korea
Grant or Contract Numbers: R21DC015868; R01DC019129