TY  - JOUR
A1  - Reifegerste, Jana
A1  - Jarvis, Rebecca
A1  - Felser, Claudia
T1  - Effects of chronological age on native and nonnative sentence processing
BT  - evidence from subject-verb agreement in German
JF  - Journal of memory and language
N2  - While much attention has been devoted to the cognition of aging multilingual individuals, little is known about how age affects their grammatical processing. We assessed subject-verb number-agreement processing in sixty native (L1) and sixty non-native (L2) speakers of German (age: 18-84) using a binary-choice sentence-completion task, along with various individual-differences tests. Our results revealed differential effects of age on L1 and L2 speakers' accuracy and reaction times (RTs). L1 speakers' RTs increased with age, and they became more susceptible to attraction errors. In contrast, L2 speakers' RTs decreased, once age-related slowing was controlled for, and their overall accuracy increased. We interpret this as resulting from increased L2 exposure. Moreover, L2 speakers' accuracy/RT patterns were more strongly affected by cognitive variables (working memory, interference control) than L1 speakers'. Our findings show that as regards bilinguals' grammatical processing ability, aging is associated with both gains (in experience) and losses (in cognitive abilities).
KW  - sentence processing
KW  - subject-verb agreement
KW  - attraction errors
KW  - second-language processing
KW  - aging
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2019.104083
SN  - 0749-596X
SN  - 1096-0821
VL  - 111
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam [u.a.]
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Reifegerste, Jana
A1  - Hauer, Franziska
A1  - Felser, Claudia
T1  - Agreement processing and attraction errors in aging
BT  - evidence from subject-verb agreement in German
JF  - Aging, neuropsychology, and cognition : a journal on normal and dysfunctional development
N2  - Effects of aging on lexical processing are well attested, but the picture is less clear for grammatical processing. Where age differences emerge, these are usually ascribed to working-memory (WM) decline. Previous studies on the influence of WM on agreement computation have yielded inconclusive results, and work on aging and subject-verb agreement processing is lacking. In two experiments (Experiment 1: timed grammaticality judgment, Experiment 2: self-paced reading + WM test), we investigated older (OA) and younger (YA) adults’ susceptibility to agreement attraction errors. We found longer reading latencies and judgment reaction times (RTs) for OAs. Further, OAs, particularly those with low WM scores, were more accepting of sentences with attraction errors than YAs. OAs showed longer reading latencies for ungrammatical sentences, again modulated by WM, than YAs. Our results indicate that OAs have greater difficulty blocking intervening nouns from interfering with the computation of agreement dependencies. WM can modulate this effect.
KW  - Subject-verb agreement
KW  - attraction errors
KW  - aging
KW  - grammaticality judgment
KW  - self-paced reading
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/13825585.2016.1251550
SN  - 1382-5585
SN  - 1744-4128
VL  - 24
IS  - 6
SP  - 672
EP  - 702
PB  - Taylor & Francis Group
CY  - Abingdon
ER  -