Abstract

RIFFO, Bernardo  and  BENOIT, Claudine. Processing of sentences with central and right embedding in young and old individuals. RLA [online]. 2007, vol.45, n.1, pp. 13-31. ISSN 0718-4883.  doi: 10.4067/S0718-48832007000100002.

This research studies the effect of aging, working memory and syntactic structure on sentence processing. In an experiment, 24 young and 21 old individuals read complex sentences with central and right embedding. The hypothesis predicts that aging is associated to working memory decrease and that both factors affect the language processing capacity. One of the main findings is a significant statistical difference between the performance of the age groups. On the other hand, it was found that the grammatical factor affected the processing time of some critical words and the response time for comprehension question about the sentence content.

Keywords : Aging; sentence processing; working memory.