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.

On-line sentence processing in Swedish: cross-linguistic developmental comparisons with French.

This study examined on-line processing of Swedish sentences in a grammaticality-judgement experiment within the framework of the Competition Model. Three age groups from 6 to 11 and an adult group were asked to detect grammatical violations as quickly as possible. Three factors concerning cue cost were studied: violation position (early vs. late), violation span (intraphrasal vs. interphrasal) and violation type (agreement vs. word order). Developmental results showed that children were always slower at detecting grammatical violations. Irrespective of age, participants were faster at judging sentences with late violations, especially in the younger groups. Intraphrasal violations were more rapidly detected than interphrasal ones, particularly in adults. Finally, agreement violations and word order ones did not differ. The hierarchy of cue cost factors indicated that violation span was the dominant one. A cross-linguistic analysis with French (Kail, 2004) underlines the developmental processing abilities and the interdependence between cue cost and cue validity.

On-line grammaticality judgments in French children and adults: a crosslinguistic perspective.

This study examined the on-line processing of French sentences in a grammaticality judgment experiment. Three age groups of French children (mean age: 6 ; 8, 8 ; 6 and 10 ; 10 years) and a group of adults were asked to detect grammatical violations as quickly as possible. Three factors were studied: the violation type: agreement violations (number and gender) vs. word order violations; the violation position: early vs. late in the sentence; the target type of the violations: intra vs. interphrasal. An example of an early interphrasal verbal agreement violation follows: 'Chaque semaine la voisine remplissent le frigo après avoir fait les courses au marché' (Every week the neighbour fill the fridge after shopping at the market). The main developmental results were the following: not surprisingly, children were always slower than adults in the detection of grammatical violations. At each age level, morphological violations were more rapidly detected than word order violations. Each age group was faster at judging sentences with later occurring violations and the position effect was especially strong in the youngest groups. Finally, intraphrasal violations were more rapidly detected than interphrasal ones, this effect being observed only in the oldest groups (i.e. 10 ; 10 years and adults). The results were compared to previous on-line data obtained in modern Greek (Kail & Diakogiorgi, 1998) showing strong similarities, even though Greek is a very rich morphological language. These results are discussed within the framework of the Competition Model, outlining the necessity to incorporate new processing constraints into the model.