Syntactic flexibility and lexical encoding in aging sentence production: an eye tracking study.

ABSTRACT:

Purpose

Successful sentence production requires lexical encoding and ordering them into a correct syntactic structure. It remains unclear how different processes involved in sentence production are affected by healthy aging. We investigated (a) if and how aging affects lexical encoding and syntactic formulation during sentence production, using auditory lexical priming and eye tracking-while-speaking paradigms and (b) if and how verbal working memory contributes to age-related changes in sentence production.

Methods

Twenty older and 20 younger adults described transitive and dative action pictures following auditory lexical primes, by which the relative ease of encoding the agent or theme nouns (for transitive pictures) and the theme and goal nouns (for dative pictures) was

SUBMITTER: Weirick JD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11381281 | biostudies-literature | 2024

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature