TY - JOUR
T1 - Coordinating Words and Sentences
T2 - Detecting Age-Related Changes in Language Production
AU - Sung, Jee Eun
AU - Jo, Eunha
AU - Choi, Sujin
AU - Lee, Jiyeon
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.
PY - 2024/1
Y1 - 2024/1
N2 - Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine whether older adults exhibit reduced abilities in coordinating lexical retrieval and syntactic formulation during sentence production and whether an individual’s working memory capacity predicts age-related changes in sentence production. Method: A total of 124 Korean-speaking individuals (79 young and 45 older adults) completed a lexical priming sentence production task. The participants described a target picture (a dog biting a monkey) after reading either an agent (dog) or a theme (monkey) prime word. The proportion of passive sentences was used as the dependent variable. Results: When the theme noun was primed, older adults produced fewer passive sentences than young adults. Working memory tasks significantly predicted individual differences in the sentence production of older adults. Conclusions: With aging, the ability to efficiently formulate syntactic structures in coordination with varying lexical information declines. Among older adults, age-related changes in these sentence production processes are associated with reduced working memory. Our constrained language production task is sensitive to detecting aging effects.
AB - Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine whether older adults exhibit reduced abilities in coordinating lexical retrieval and syntactic formulation during sentence production and whether an individual’s working memory capacity predicts age-related changes in sentence production. Method: A total of 124 Korean-speaking individuals (79 young and 45 older adults) completed a lexical priming sentence production task. The participants described a target picture (a dog biting a monkey) after reading either an agent (dog) or a theme (monkey) prime word. The proportion of passive sentences was used as the dependent variable. Results: When the theme noun was primed, older adults produced fewer passive sentences than young adults. Working memory tasks significantly predicted individual differences in the sentence production of older adults. Conclusions: With aging, the ability to efficiently formulate syntactic structures in coordination with varying lexical information declines. Among older adults, age-related changes in these sentence production processes are associated with reduced working memory. Our constrained language production task is sensitive to detecting aging effects.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85182026310&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1044/2023_JSLHR-23-00222
DO - 10.1044/2023_JSLHR-23-00222
M3 - Article
C2 - 38099825
AN - SCOPUS:85182026310
SN - 1092-4388
VL - 67
SP - 211
EP - 220
JO - Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
JF - Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
IS - 1
ER -