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Diving into a pool or volcano? Examining the influence of sentence context and task demands on sentence reading in younger and older adults

Cognitive ageing is often associated with slower lexical processing, which might influence both language production and comprehension. Words are typically used in context, which can further influence word processing and potential age differences. However, it remains unclear how older adults are affe...

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Autores principales: Haigh, Pennie, Hanif, Naveen, de Bruin, Angela
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9803221/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36584104
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0279555
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author Haigh, Pennie
Hanif, Naveen
de Bruin, Angela
author_facet Haigh, Pennie
Hanif, Naveen
de Bruin, Angela
author_sort Haigh, Pennie
collection PubMed
description Cognitive ageing is often associated with slower lexical processing, which might influence both language production and comprehension. Words are typically used in context, which can further influence word processing and potential age differences. However, it remains unclear how older adults are affected by context during reading. Older adults are reported to have in-tact semantic knowledge, which could potentially help them to process words predicted by semantic information in the preceding context. However, potential difficulties with semantic control might mean older adults have greater difficulty suppressing interfering information from mismatching contexts. In this study we examined the influence of contexts that either predicted a specific target word (“matched”, e.g., “The man watched the lava erupt from the volcano”) or predicted another word than the target (“mismatched”, e.g., “The swimmer dived into the volcano”) as compared to neutral contexts (e.g., “They went to see the volcano”). We also examined the potential role of task demands by asking participants to either just read the sentences for comprehension or to answer questions. Forty younger adults (18–35 years old) and forty older adults (65–80 years old) completed a self-paced reading task in which we measured reading times for the target words. Older adults showed slower reading times overall. Matched sentence contexts facilitated reading times in both age groups. Surprisingly, mismatched sentence contexts did not hinder reading times in either age group. Furthermore, reading times were not influenced by task demands. Together, this shows the importance of studying language in context. While interference from mismatching sentence contexts might have not been substantial enough to delay reading, reading was faster when processing expected words. This suggests older adults can indeed benefit from semantic knowledge to facilitate word processing during comprehension. This occurred even when no additional task was presented and people were purely reading for comprehension.
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spelling pubmed-98032212022-12-31 Diving into a pool or volcano? Examining the influence of sentence context and task demands on sentence reading in younger and older adults Haigh, Pennie Hanif, Naveen de Bruin, Angela PLoS One Research Article Cognitive ageing is often associated with slower lexical processing, which might influence both language production and comprehension. Words are typically used in context, which can further influence word processing and potential age differences. However, it remains unclear how older adults are affected by context during reading. Older adults are reported to have in-tact semantic knowledge, which could potentially help them to process words predicted by semantic information in the preceding context. However, potential difficulties with semantic control might mean older adults have greater difficulty suppressing interfering information from mismatching contexts. In this study we examined the influence of contexts that either predicted a specific target word (“matched”, e.g., “The man watched the lava erupt from the volcano”) or predicted another word than the target (“mismatched”, e.g., “The swimmer dived into the volcano”) as compared to neutral contexts (e.g., “They went to see the volcano”). We also examined the potential role of task demands by asking participants to either just read the sentences for comprehension or to answer questions. Forty younger adults (18–35 years old) and forty older adults (65–80 years old) completed a self-paced reading task in which we measured reading times for the target words. Older adults showed slower reading times overall. Matched sentence contexts facilitated reading times in both age groups. Surprisingly, mismatched sentence contexts did not hinder reading times in either age group. Furthermore, reading times were not influenced by task demands. Together, this shows the importance of studying language in context. While interference from mismatching sentence contexts might have not been substantial enough to delay reading, reading was faster when processing expected words. This suggests older adults can indeed benefit from semantic knowledge to facilitate word processing during comprehension. This occurred even when no additional task was presented and people were purely reading for comprehension. Public Library of Science 2022-12-30 /pmc/articles/PMC9803221/ /pubmed/36584104 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0279555 Text en © 2022 Haigh et al https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Haigh, Pennie
Hanif, Naveen
de Bruin, Angela
Diving into a pool or volcano? Examining the influence of sentence context and task demands on sentence reading in younger and older adults
title Diving into a pool or volcano? Examining the influence of sentence context and task demands on sentence reading in younger and older adults
title_full Diving into a pool or volcano? Examining the influence of sentence context and task demands on sentence reading in younger and older adults
title_fullStr Diving into a pool or volcano? Examining the influence of sentence context and task demands on sentence reading in younger and older adults
title_full_unstemmed Diving into a pool or volcano? Examining the influence of sentence context and task demands on sentence reading in younger and older adults
title_short Diving into a pool or volcano? Examining the influence of sentence context and task demands on sentence reading in younger and older adults
title_sort diving into a pool or volcano? examining the influence of sentence context and task demands on sentence reading in younger and older adults
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9803221/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36584104
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0279555
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