Dataset Information

Age differences in the effect of animacy on Mandarin sentence processing.

ABSTRACT: Animate nouns are preferred for grammatical subjects, whereas inanimate nouns are preferred for grammatical objects. Animacy provides important semantic cues for sentence comprehension. However, how individuals' ability to use this animacy cue changes with advancing age is still not clear. The current study investigated whether older adults and younger adults were differentially sensitive to this semantic constraint in processing Mandarin relative clauses, using a self-paced reading paradigm. The sentences used in the study contained subject relative clauses or object relative clauses and had animate or inanimate subjects. The results indicate that the animacy manipulation affected the younger adults more than the older adults in online processing. Younger adults had longer reading times for all segments in subject relative clauses than in object relative clauses when the subjects were inanimate, whereas there was no significant difference in reading times between subject and object relative clauses when the subjects were animate. In the older group, animacy was not found to influence the processing difficulty of subject relative clauses and object relative clauses. Compared with younger adults, older adults were less sensitive to animacy constraints in relative clause processing. The findings indicate that the use of animacy cues became less efficient in the ageing population. The results can be explained by the capacity constrained comprehension theory, according to which older adults have greater difficulty in integrating semantic information with syntactic processing due to the lack of sufficient cognitive resources.

SUBMITTER: Liu X

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6378088 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Age differences in the effect of animacy on Mandarin sentence processing.

Liu Xinmiao X Wang Wenbin W Wang Haiyan H

PeerJ 20190214

Animate nouns are preferred for grammatical subjects, whereas inanimate nouns are preferred for grammatical objects. Animacy provides important semantic cues for sentence comprehension. However, how individuals' ability to use this animacy cue changes with advancing age is still not clear. The current study investigated whether older adults and younger adults were differentially sensitive to this semantic constraint in processing Mandarin relative clauses, using a self-paced reading paradigm. Th ...[more]

PMID: 30783575

Similar Datasets

Project description:Speakers' readiness to describe event scenes using active or passive constructions has previously been attributed-among other factors-to the accessibility of referents. While most research has highlighted the accessibility of agents, the present study examines whether patients' accessibility can be modulated by means of visual preview of the patient character (derived accessibility), as well as by manipulating the animacy status of patients (inherent accessibility). Crucially, we also examined whether effects of accessibility were amenable to the visuospatial position of the patient by presenting the patient character either to the left or to the right of the agent. German native speakers were asked to describe drawings depicting event scenes while their gaze and speech were recorded. Our results show that making patients more accessible using derived and inherent accessibility factors led to more produced passives, shorter speech onsets, and a reduction of fixations on patients. Complementing previous research on agent accessibility, our findings demonstrate that the accessibility of patients affected both sentence production and looking behavior. While effects were observed for both inherent and derived accessibility, they appeared to be more pronounced for the latter. Regarding character position, we observed a significant effect of position on participants' gaze patterns and structural choices, suggesting that position itself can be considered an accessibility-related factor. Importantly, the position of a patient also interacted with our manipulation of its accessibility via visual preview. Participants produced more passives after preview than no preview for left-positioned but not for right-positioned patients, demonstrating that effects of patient accessibility (i.e., visual preview) were susceptible to character position. A similar interaction was observed for participants' viewing patterns. These findings provide the first evidence that the position of a referent is a factor that interacts with other accessibility-related factors (i.e., cueing), emphasizing the need of controlling for position effects when testing referent accessibility.

Project description:Purpose Reorganization of language networks in aphasia takes advantage of the facts that (a) the brain is an organ of plasticity, with neuronal changes occurring throughout the life span, including following brain damage; (b) plasticity is highly experience dependent; and (c) as with any learning system, language reorganization involves a synergistic interplay between organism-intrinsic (i.e., cognitive and brain) and organism-extrinsic (i.e., environmental) variables. A major goal for clinical treatment of aphasia is to be able to prescribe treatment and predict its outcome based on the neurocognitive deficit profiles of individual patients. This review article summarizes the results of research examining the neurocognitive effects of psycholinguistically based treatment (i.e., Treatment of Underlying Forms; Thompson & Shapiro, 2005) for sentence processing impairments in individuals with chronic agrammatic aphasia resulting from stroke and primary progressive aphasia and addresses both behavioral and brain variables related to successful treatment outcomes. The influences of lesion volume and location, perfusion (blood flow), and resting-state neural activity on language recovery are also discussed as related to recovery of agrammatism and other language impairments. Based on these and other data, principles for promoting neuroplasticity of language networks are presented. Conclusions Sentence processing treatment results in improved comprehension and production of complex syntactic structures in chronic agrammatism and generalization to less complex, linguistically related structures in chronic agrammatism. Patients also show treatment-induced shifts toward normal-like online sentence processing routines (based on eye movement data) and changes in neural recruitment patterns (based on functional neuroimaging), with posttreatment activation of regions overlapping with those within sentence processing and dorsal attention networks engaged by neurotypical adults performing the same task. These findings provide compelling evidence that treatment focused on principles of neuroplasticity promotes neurocognitive recovery in chronic agrammatic aphasia. Presentation Videohttps://doi.org/10.23641/asha.10257587.

Dataset Information

Age differences in the effect of animacy on Mandarin sentence processing.

Publications

Age differences in the effect of animacy on Mandarin sentence processing.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets