Sentence processing speed in older adults: A strategic slowing?

One of the most prominent age-related changes is the slowing of many cognitive processes, including language processing. Even neurologically healthy older adults experience slower lexical processing in word production, slower syntactic parsing in sentence comprehension, etc. Still, the nature of this slowing is not completely understood. Is it necessary and inevitable, or is it due to any ‘strategic’ reasons, such as caution, error avoidance or perhaps an unconscious tendency to save cognitive effort and adapt the cognitive load?

We tested the ‘strategic’ hypothesis in an experiment with 48 younger and older participants. The participants read sentences and answered multiple-choice comprehension questions. On the first day of the experiment, the participants read sentences in a self-paced mode and we calculated their individual reading speed. On the second day, the sentence presentation rate was set externally: in one session, it was fixed at the participant’s median reading speed; in the other session, it was twice as fast. The hypothesis was that older participants initially read slower than necessary for comprehension, for strategic reasons. So when sentence presentation speed is externally increased, their comprehension should decrease less than in younger adults, who initially read at the speed closer to their performance limits. However, the hypothesis was not confirmed: younger and older adults did not differ in how much their comprehension was affected by the increase of the sentence presentation rate relative to their self-paced reading speed. In other words, the experiment did not find evidence for a strategic nature of age-related slowing of sentence processing. Rather, the slowing appears to be inherent to healthy aging, possibly providing the time necessary for lexical access and grammatical processing.

Plain-language summary

'Researchers Investigate Why Older People Read More Slowly', IQ.hse.ru

 

Publications

Malyutina S., Laurinavichyute A., Terekhina M., Lapin Y. No evidence for strategic nature of age-related slowing in sentence processing // Psychology and Aging. 2018. Vol. 33. No. 7. P. 1045-1059. [A plain-language press release at IQ.HSE.ru]

 

Presentations

Myslina (Terekhina) M., Malyutina S., Lapin Y., Laurinavichyute A. Проверка гипотезы стратегического замедления языковой обработки у пожилых людей: эксперимент на понимание предложений [Testing the strategic hypothesis of age-related slowing in language processing: A sentence comprehension study]. Poster presented at the 4^th Conference “Cognitive Science in Moscow: New Research», Moscow, Russia, 15 June 2017.

Myslina (Terekhina) M., Malyutina S., Lapin Y., Laurinavichyute A. Speed of sentence processing in older adults: A strategic slowing? Poster presented at the Aging & Cognition conference, Zurich, Switzerland, 20-22 April 2017.

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