TY  - JOUR
A1  - Malyutina, Svetlana
A1  - Laurinavichyute, Anna
A1  - Terekhina, Maria
A1  - Lapin, Yevgeniy
T1  - No evidence for strategic nature of age-related slowing in sentence processing
T2  - Psychology and aging
N2  - Older adults demonstrate a slower speed of linguistic processing, including sentence processing. In nonlinguistic cognitive domains such as memory, research suggests that age-related slowing of processing speed may be a strategy adopted in order to avoid potential error and/or to spare “cognitive resources.” So far, very few studies have tested whether older adults’ slower processing speed in the linguistic domain has a strategic nature as well. To fill this gap, we tested whether older adults can maintain language processing accuracy when a faster processing speed is enforced externally. Specifically, we compared sentence comprehension accuracy in younger and older adults when sentences were presented at the participant’s median self-paced reading speed versus twice as fast. We hypothesized that an external speed increase will cause a smaller accuracy decline in older than younger adults because older adults tend to adopt self-paced processing speeds “further away” from their performance limits. The hypothesis was not confirmed: The decline in accuracy due to faster presentation did not differ by age group. Thus, we found no evidence for strategic nature of age-related slowing of sentence processing. On the basis of our experimental design, we suggest that the age-related slowing of sentence processing is caused not only by motor slowdown, but also by a slowdown in cognitive processing
KW  - aging
KW  - processing speed
KW  - sentence comprehension
KW  - language and aging
KW  - processing strategies
Y1  - 2018
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/51263
SN  - 0882-7974
SN  - 1939-1498
VL  - 33
IS  - 7
SP  - 1045
EP  - 1059
PB  - American Psychological Association
CY  - Washington
ER  -