Aging effects and working memory in garden-path sentence comprehension

摘要

The current study examined whether older adults exhibit difficulty in recovering from syntactically ambiguous garden-path sentences, and whether this difficulty is predicted by working memory capacity (WM). This study found several points. First, there was a garden-path effect regardless of age group. Second, there were age-related differences between young and elderly adults for the sentences with temporary syntactic ambiguity, in on- and off-line measures. Third, the age-related effects were predicted by WM. These points indicate that syntactic ambiguity resolution is affected by healthy cognitive aging, and suggest that age-related WM changes may be responsible for these differences.