Effects of chronological age on native and nonnative sentence processing
- 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 (inWhile 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).…
| Author details: | Jana ReifegersteORCiD, Rebecca Jarvis, Claudia FelserORCiDGND |
|---|---|
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2019.104083 |
| ISSN: | 0749-596X |
| ISSN: | 1096-0821 |
| Title of parent work (English): | Journal of memory and language |
| Subtitle (English): | evidence from subject-verb agreement in German |
| Publisher: | Elsevier |
| Place of publishing: | Amsterdam [u.a.] |
| Publication type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Date of first publication: | 2020/01/06 |
| Publication year: | 2020 |
| Release date: | 2023/12/14 |
| Tag: | aging; attraction errors; second-language processing; sentence processing; subject-verb agreement |
| Volume: | 111 |
| Article number: | 104083 |
| Number of pages: | 23 |
| Funding institution: | Alexander-von-Humboldt-Professorship; Alexander von Humboldt Foundation |
| Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
| DDC classification: | 4 Sprache / 43 Deutsch, germanische Sprachen allgemein |
| 4 Sprache / 41 Linguistik / 410 Linguistik | |
| Peer review: | Referiert |
