TY  - JOUR
A1  - Malyutina, Svetlana
A1  - Laurinavichyute, Anna
A1  - Terekhina, Maria
A1  - Lapin, Yevgeniy
T1  - No evidence for strategic nature of age-related slowing in sentence processing
JF  - Psychology and aging
N2  - Older adults demonstrate a slower speed of linguistic processing, including sentence processing. In nonlinguistic cognitive domains such as memory, research suggests that age-related slowing of processing speed may be a strategy adopted in order to avoid potential error and/or to spare “cognitive resources.” So far, very few studies have tested whether older adults’ slower processing speed in the linguistic domain has a strategic nature as well. To fill this gap, we tested whether older adults can maintain language processing accuracy when a faster processing speed is enforced externally. Specifically, we compared sentence comprehension accuracy in younger and older adults when sentences were presented at the participant’s median self-paced reading speed versus twice as fast. We hypothesized that an external speed increase will cause a smaller accuracy decline in older than younger adults because older adults tend to adopt self-paced processing speeds “further away” from their performance limits. The hypothesis was not confirmed: The decline in accuracy due to faster presentation did not differ by age group. Thus, we found no evidence for strategic nature of age-related slowing of sentence processing. On the basis of our experimental design, we suggest that the age-related slowing of sentence processing is caused not only by motor slowdown, but also by a slowdown in cognitive processing
KW  - aging
KW  - processing speed
KW  - sentence comprehension
KW  - language and aging
KW  - processing strategies
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1037/pag0000302
SN  - 0882-7974
SN  - 1939-1498
VL  - 33
IS  - 7
SP  - 1045
EP  - 1059
PB  - American Psychological Association
CY  - Washington
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Malyutina, Svetlana
A1  - Dragoy, Olga V.
A1  - Ivanova, Maria
A1  - Laurinavichyute, Anna
A1  - Petrushevsky, Alexey
A1  - Meindl, Thomas
A1  - Pöppel, Ernst
A1  - Gutyrchik, Evgeny
T1  - Fishing is not wrestling: Neural underpinnings of the verb instrumentality effect
JF  - Journal of neurolinguistics : an international journal for the study of brain function in language behavior and experience
N2  - Previous clinical research has shown a positive effect of instrumentality on verb retrieval in individuals with aphasia. Performance on instrumental verbs incorporating an obligatory tool into their conceptual representation (e.g., to cut) is more accurate compared to non instrumental verbs (e.g., to tear), possibly due to more specific conceptual representations of instrumental verbs. Seeking the neural correlates of the differences between instrumental and non-instrumental verbs, we conducted an fMRI study with 16 German speakers who performed a verb-object matching task with instrumental and non instrumental verbs. We found that an extensive neural network. including but not limited to frontal and temporal language-related areas was more involved in the semantic processing of non-instrumental compared to instrumental verbs. We argue that this reflects a greater load associated with the processing of less semantically structured/restricted representations of non-instrumental verbs. The unavailability of additional neural resources needed for the processing of non-instrumental verbs in individuals with aphasia may lead to better behavioral performance on instrumental than non instrumental verbs. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
KW  - Verbs
KW  - Action verbs
KW  - Verb retrieval
KW  - Instrumentality
KW  - Semantic complexity
KW  - Neurocognitive load
KW  - Functional magnetic resonance imaging
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2016.03.002
SN  - 0911-6044
VL  - 40
SP  - 37
EP  - 54
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Oxford
ER  -