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Processing of center-embedded and right-branching relative clause sentences by normal elderly individuals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Shari R. Baum
Shari R. Baum*
Affiliation:
McGill University.
*
School of Human Communication Disorders, McGill University, 1266 Pine Avenue West, Montreal, Quebec H3G 1A8, Canada
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Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to explore processing of relative clause structures by normal elderly adults. Four groups of subjects (aged 20–29 years, 60–69 years, 70–79 years, and 80–89 years) participated in a lexical decision task and a sentence repetition task. Results of the lexical decision task revealed longer reaction times and somewhat different patterns of performance for the older subjects as compared to the young subjects; on the repetition task, the oldest subjects performed more poorly overall. Findings are suggestive of a reduction in computational capacity in the elderly subjects, which may account for observed decrements in syntactic processing as compared to young adults.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , January 1993 , pp. 75 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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