TY  - JOUR
A1  - Reifegerste, Jana
A1  - Felser, Claudia
T1  - Effects of Aging on Interference During Pronoun Resolution
T2  - Journal of speech, language, and hearing research
N2  - Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of healthy aging on the ability to suppress grammatically illicit antecedents during pronoun resolution. Method: In 2 reading-based acceptability-judgment experiments, younger and older speakers of German read sentences containing an object pronoun and 2 potential antecedent noun phrases, only 1 of which was a grammatically licit antecedent. Using a gender-mismatch paradigm, we compared to what extent younger and older speakers were sensitive to feature (mis)matches between the pronoun and either of the 2 antecedents. All participants were fluent readers of German and had finished at least secondary education. Results: Experiment 1 used a self-paced reading paradigm. Older speakers showed greater sensitivity than younger ones to mismatching licit antecedents, but no group showed any evidence of interference from an intervening competitor antecedent. In Experiment 2, we increased the processing demand by using paced word-by-word stimulus presentation and longer sentences. Here, older participants showed reduced sensitivity, in comparison with younger people, to mismatching licit antecedents. Unlike our younger participants, they showed signs of distraction by the presence of a linearly closer but grammatically inappropriate antecedent when no appropriate antecedent was available.
Y1  - 2017
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/46117
SN  - 1092-4388
SN  - 1558-9102
VL  - 60
SP  - 3573
EP  - 3589
PB  - American Speech-Language-Hearing Assoc.
CY  - Rockville
ER  -