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.