0000000000083967
AUTHOR
Linda Wheeldon
Healthy Aging and Sentence Production: Disrupted Lexical Access in the Context of Intact Syntactic Planning.
AbstractHealthy ageing does not affect all features of language processing equally. In this study, we investigated the effects of ageing on different processes involved in fluent sentence production, a complex task that requires the successful execution and coordination of multiple processes. In Experiment 1, we investigated age-related effects on the speed of syntax selection using a syntactic priming paradigm. Both young and older adults produced target sentences quicker following syntactically related primes compared to unrelated primes, indicating that syntactic facilitation effects are preserved with age. In Experiment 2, we investigated age-related effects in syntactic planning and le…
THE OSCILLATORY MECHANISMS ASSOCIATED WITH SYNTACTIC BINDING IN HEALTHY AGEING
Older adults frequently display differential patterns of brain activity compared to young adults in the same task, alongside widespread neuroanatomical changes. Differing functional activity patterns in older adults are commonly interpreted as being compensatory (e.g., Cabeza, Locantore & McIntosh, 2002). We examined the oscillatory activity in the EEG during syntactic binding in young and older adults, as well as the relationship between oscillatory activity and behavioural performance on a syntactic judgement task within the older adults. 19 young and 41 older adults listened to two-word sentences that differentially load onto morpho-syntactic binding: correct syntactic binding (m…
Evidence against preserved syntactic comprehension in healthy aging.
We investigated age-related differences in syntactic comprehension in young and older adults. Most previous research found no evidence of age-related decline in syntactic processing. We investigated elementary syntactic comprehension of minimal sentences (e.g., I cook), minimizing the influence of working memory. We also investigated the contribution of semantic processing by comparing sentences containing real verbs (e.g., I cook) versus pseudoverbs (e.g., I spuff). We measured the speed and accuracy of detecting syntactic agreement errors (e.g., I cooks, I spuffs). We found that older adults were slower and less accurate than younger adults in detecting syntactic agreement errors for both…
Higher physical fitness levels are associated with less language decline in healthy ageing
Healthy ageing is associated with decline in cognitive abilities such as language. Aerobic fitness has been shown to ameliorate decline in some cognitive domains, but the potential benefits for language have not been examined. In a cross-sectional sample, we investigated the relationship between aerobic fitness and tip-of-the-tongue states. These are among the most frequent cognitive failures in healthy older adults and occur when a speaker knows a word but is unable to produce it. We found that healthy older adults indeed experience more tip-of-the-tongue states than young adults. Importantly, higher aerobic fitness levels decrease the probability of experiencing tip-of-the-tongue states i…
Detecting impaired language processing in patients with mild cognitive impairment using around‐the‐ear cEEgrid electrodes
Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is the term used to identify those individuals with subjective and objective cognitive decline but with preserved activities of daily living and an absence of dementia. Although MCI can impact functioning in different cognitive domains, most notably episodic memory, relatively little is known about the comprehension of language in MCI. In this study, we used around-the-ear electrodes (cEEGrids) to identify impairments during language comprehension in patients with MCI. In a group of 23 patients with MCI and 23 age-matched controls, language comprehension was tested in a two-word phrase paradigm. We examined the oscillatory changes following word onset as a fu…
Modulation in alpha band activity reflects syntax composition: an MEG study of minimal syntactic binding
Successful sentence comprehension requires the binding, or composition, of multiple words into larger structures to establish meaning. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), we investigated the neural mechanisms involved in binding of language at the level of syntax, in a task in which contributions from semantics were minimized. Participants were auditorily presented with minimal sentences that required binding (pronoun and pseudo-verb with the corresponding morphological inflection; "she grushes") and wordlists that did not require binding (two pseudo-verbs; "cugged grushes"). Relative to the no binding wordlist condition, we found that syntactic binding in a minimal sentence structure was a…
Beyond decomposition: Processing zero-derivations in English visual word recognition
Four experiments investigate the effects of covert morphological complexity during visual word recognition. Zero-derivations occur in English in which a change of word class occurs without any change in surface form (e.g., a boat-to boat; to soak-a soak). Boat is object-derived and is a basic noun (N), whereas soak is action-derived and is a basic verb (V). As the suffix {-ing} is only attached to verbs, deriving boating from its base, requires two steps, boat(N) > boat(V) > boating(V), while soaking can be derived in one step from soak(V). Experiments 1 to 3 used masked priming at different prime durations to test matched sets of one- and two-step verbs for morphological (soaking-SOA…
Spoken Word Production
This chapter examines two distinct stages of the production of spoken words: the retrieval of semantic and lexical representations, followed by morphological and phonological processing. In both cases, it summarizes models of lexical representation and lexical selection that have focused on the retrieval of single words. These models agree that different lexical information becomes available at different points in time, with access to semantic and syntactic information preceding access to information about lexical form. The structure of this review reflects this dichotomy. Comprehensive production models must also account for the sequencing and timing of lexical processing in multiword utte…
Compounds, phrases and clitics in connected speech
Abstract Four language production experiments examine how English speakers plan compound words during phonological encoding. The experiments tested production latencies in both delayed and online tasks for English noun-noun compounds (e.g., daytime), adjective-noun phrases (e.g., dark time), and monomorphemic words (e.g., denim). In delayed production, speech onset latencies reflect the total number of prosodic units in the target sentence. In online production, speech latencies reflect the size of the first prosodic unit. Compounds are metrically similar to adjective-noun phrases as they contain two lexical and two prosodic words. However, in Experiments 1 and 2, native English speakers tr…
Detecting impaired language processing in MCI patients using around-the-ear cEEgrid electrodes
AbstractMild cognitive impairment (MCI) is the term used to identify those individuals with subjective and objective cognitive decline but with preserved activities of daily living and an absence of dementia. While MCI can impact functioning in different cognitive domains, most notably episodic memory, relatively little is known about the comprehension of language in MCI. In this study we used around-the-ear electrodes (cEEGrids) to identify impairments during language comprehension in MCI patients. In a group of 23 MCI patients and 23 age-matched controls, language comprehension was tested in a two-word phrase paradigm. We examined the oscillatory changes following word onset as a function…
Age-related effects on lexical, but not syntactic, processes during sentence production
ABSTRACT We investigated the effect of healthy ageing on the lexical and syntactic processes involved in sentence production. Young and older adults completed a semantic interference sentence production task: we manipulated whether the target picture and distractor word were semantically related or unrelated and whether they fell within the same phrase (“the watch and the clock/hippo move apart”) or different phrases (“the watch moves above the clock/hippo”). Both age groups were slower to initiate sentences containing a larger, compared to a smaller, initial phrase, indicating a similar phrasal scope of advanced planning. However, older adults displayed significantly larger semantic interf…
Structural priming is supported by different components of nondeclarative memory: Evidence from priming across the lifespan
Abstract Structural priming is the tendency to repeat syntactic structure across sentences and can be divided into short-term (prime to immediately following target) and long-term (across an experimental session) components. Current theories of structural priming propose that different memory systems support these components, however, this study investigates how non-declarative memory could support both the transient, short-term and the persistent, long-term structural priming effects commonly seen in the literature. We propose that these characteristics are supported by different subcomponents of non-declarative memory: Perceptual and conceptual non-declarative memory respectively. Previou…
Phonological precision for word recognition in skilled readers
According to the lexical quality hypothesis (Perfetti, 2007), differences in the orthographic, semantic, and phonological representations of words will affect individual reading performance. Whilst several studies have focused on orthographic precision and semantic coherence, few have considered phonological precision. The present study used a suite of individual difference measures to assess which components of lexical quality contributed to competition resolution in a masked priming experiment. The experiment measured form priming for word and pseudoword targets with dense and sparse neighbourhoods in 84 university students. Individual difference measures of language and cognitive skills …
Data for: Beyond decomposition: processing zero-derivations in English visual word recognition
RT data from masked priming studies (Experiments 1-3). Dat from delayed priming study (Experiment4). Key to experimental parameters. THIS DATASET IS ARCHIVED AT DANS/EASY, BUT NOT ACCESSIBLE HERE. TO VIEW A LIST OF FILES AND ACCESS THE FILES IN THIS DATASET CLICK ON THE DOI-LINK ABOVE