Online grammaticality judgments in French young and older adults.

UNLABELLED: BACKGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT: A goal of language and aging research is to determine the nature of change in language-processing skills. In this study the authors examine the role of age and use of cues (e.g., word order, verbal agreement, sentence structure) on online sentence processing. METHODS: French young and older adults were asked to detect grammatical violations in sentences as quickly as possible. Detection times were analyzed as a function of participants' age and sentence characteristics (i.e., violation type, span, and position). RESULTS: Above and beyond main effects of participant's age and linguistic features, results showed age-related differences in effects of linguistic cues on sentence processing and important individual differences during aging in hierarchies of cue strength. CONCLUSION: Young and older adults use similar linguistic cues in the online process, but loss of cognitive resources with age shows a cost of cue use and a greater use of context.

Strategy switch costs in arithmetic problem solving.

Three experiments tested whether switching between strategies involves a cost. In three experiments, participants had to give approximate products to two-digit multiplication problems (e.g., 47 x 76). They were told which strategy to use (Experiments 1 and 2) or could choose among strategies (Experiment 3). The participants showed poorer performance when they used different strategies on two consecutive trials than when they used the same strategy. They also used the same strategy over two consecutive problems more often than they used different strategies. These effects, termed strategy switch costs, were found when the participants executed the easiest strategy and when they solved easy problems. We discuss possible processes underlying these strategy switch costs and the implications of these strategy switch costs for models of strategy choices.

Aging and numerosity estimation.

In two experiments, young and older participants were asked to find the approximate number of dots in collections including between 40 and 460 dots. Experiment 1 showed that both age groups had comparable performance and no age-related differences in the power-function exponents for numerosity. Experiment 2 found that these age-related similarities were not due to speed-accuracy trade-offs or to compensation by older adults for potential age-related decline in numerosity estimation processes. Furthermore, young and older participants' estimation performance was influenced by physical features of stimuli only for very large numerosities, presumably because these are poorly represented in long-term memory. Implications of these findings for the further understanding of how participants accomplish numerosity estimation tasks and effects of aging in this domain are discussed.

Adults' age-related differences in adaptivity of strategy choices: evidence from computational estimation.

Four experiments document adults' age-related changes in computational estimation performance and in adaptivity of strategy choices (i.e., the ability to choose the most precise strategy on each trial). Young and older adults were asked to provide estimates of 2-by-2-digit multiplication problems (e.g., 43 x 78) under varying conditions of speed and accuracy emphasis. The main findings showed that (a) older adults provided less accurate estimates and took more time to estimate, especially on the most difficult problems or when using harder strategies; (b) young and older adults had similar strategy preferences; and (c) older adults chose estimation strategies less adaptively than young adults. Implications of these findings for understanding strategic changes during adulthood in a wide variety of cognitive domains are discussed.

Children's strategies in computational estimation.

We investigated strategies used to estimate answers to addition problems. Two hundred and sixteen participants (72 adults, 72 sixth graders, and 72 fourth graders) had to provide estimates of three-by-three digit addition problems (e.g., 249 + 743). The choice/no-choice method was used to obtain unbiased estimates of the performance characteristics of strategies. Results showed that (a) at all ages, the most common strategy was to round both operands down to the closest smaller decades, (b) strategy use and execution were influenced by participants' age, problem features, and relative strategy performance, and (c) age-related changes in computational estimation include changes in relative strategy use and execution, as well as in the relative influences of problem and strategy characteristics on strategy choices. Implications of these findings for understanding age-related differences in strategic aspects of computational estimation performance are discussed.