Effects of animacy and sentence type on silent reading comprehension in aphasia: An eye-tracking study.

ABSTRACT: The present study examined how healthy aging and aphasia influence the capacity for readers to generate structural predictions during online reading, and how animacy cues influence this process. Non-brain-damaged younger (n =24) and older (n =12) adults (Experiment 1) and individuals with aphasia (IWA; n =11; Experiment 2) read subject relative and object relative sentences in an eye-tracking experiment. Half of the sentences included animate sentential subjects, and the other half included inanimate sentential subjects. All three groups used animacy information to mitigate effects of syntactic complexity. These effects were greater in older than younger adults. IWA were sensitive to structural frequency, with longer reading times for object relative than subject relative sentences. As in

SUBMITTER: DeDe G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7945721 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature