Pay now or pay later: aging and the role of boundary salience in self-regulation of conceptual integration in sentence processing.

Previous research has suggested that older readers may self-regulate input during reading differently from the way younger readers do, so as to accommodate age-graded change in processing capacity. For example, older adults may pause more frequently for conceptual integration. Presumably, such an allocation policy would enable older readers to manage the cognitive demands of constructing a semantic representation of the text by off-loading the products of intermediate computations to long-term memory, thus decreasing memory demands as conceptual load increases.