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  -