Abstract

BADANI SCHONEWEG, CARLA; OSSES VECCHI, ALEJANDRO  and  RIFFO OCARES, BERNARDO. Computational modelling of the effects of aging on syntactic processing in Spanish: a study using neural networks. RLA [online]. 2011, vol.49, n.1, pp. 29-50. ISSN 0718-4883.  doi: 10.4067/S0718-48832011000100003.

The focus of this article is the application of artificial neural networks to the quantification of the effects of aging on syntactic processing of complex sentences in Spanish. The network models studied were able to establish frst that there are two distinct groups of readers: older adults and younger adults, whose reading performance is characterized distinctively due to the progressive reduction in working memory and in turn its effects on reading comprehension tasks. A second important result is that it was possible to "age" a network considered "young", obtaining differences in a single neuron in a hidden layer, with similar yields. A third result shows the effect of gender on reading performance.

Keywords : Aging; neural network; working memory; age; sintactic processing.