TY  - JOUR
A1  - Reifegerste, Jana
A1  - Jarvis, Rebecca
A1  - Felser, Claudia
T1  - Effects of chronological age on native and nonnative sentence processing
T2  - 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
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/60499
SN  - 0749-596X
SN  - 1096-0821
VL  - 111
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam [u.a.]
ER  -