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  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Reifegerste, Jana
A1  - Felser, Claudia
T1  - Effects of Aging on Interference During Pronoun Resolution
JF  - 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
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1044/2017_JSLHR-L-17-0183
SN  - 1092-4388
SN  - 1558-9102
VL  - 60
SP  - 3573
EP  - 3589
PB  - American Speech-Language-Hearing Assoc.
CY  - Rockville
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Reifegerste, Jana
A1  - Meyer, Antje
A1  - Zwitserlood, Pienie
T1  - Inflectional complexity and experience affect plural processing in younger and older readers of Dutch and German
JF  - Language, cognition and neuroscience
N2  - According to dual-route models of morphological processing, regular inflections can be retrieved as whole-word forms or decomposed into morphemes. Baayen, Dijkstra, and Schreuder [(1997). Singulars and plurals in Dutch: Evidence for a parallel dual-route model. Journal of Memory and Language, 37, 94–117. doi:10.1006/jmla.1997.2509] proposed a dual-route model in which singular-dominant plurals (“brides”) are decomposed, while plural-dominant plurals (“peas”) are accessed as whole-word units. We report two lexical-decision experiments investigating how plural processing is influenced by participants’ age and morphological complexity of the language (German/Dutch). For all Dutch participants and older German participants, we replicated the interaction between number and dominance reported by Baayen and colleagues. Younger German participants showed a main effect of number, indicating decomposition of all plurals. Access to stored forms seems to depend on morphological richness and experience with word forms. The data pattern fits neither full-decomposition nor full-storage models, but is compatible with dual-route models.
KW  - Morphological processing
KW  - morphological complexity
KW  - ageing
KW  - lexical decision
KW  - plural processing
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2016.1247213
SN  - 2327-3798
SN  - 2327-3801
VL  - 32
IS  - 4
SP  - 471
EP  - 487
PB  - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY  - Abingdon
ER  -