Abstract While much attention has been devoted to the cognition of aging multilingual individuals, little is known about how age affects their grammatical processing. We assessed subject-verb number-agreement processing in sixty native (L1) and sixty non-native (L2) speakers of German (age: 18–84) using a binary-choice sentence-completion task, along with various individual-differences tests. Our results revealed differential effects of age on L1 and L2 speakers' accuracy and reaction times (RTs). L1 speakers’ RTs increased with age, and they became more susceptible to attraction errors. In contrast, L2 speakers’ RTs decreased, once age-related slowing was controlled for, and their overall accuracy increased. We interpret this as resulting from increased L2 exposure. Moreover, L2 speakers’ accuracy/RT patterns were more strongly affected by cognitive variables (working memory, interference control) than L1 speakers’. Our findings show that as regards bilinguals' grammatical processing ability, aging is associated with both gains (in experience) and losses (in cognitive abilities).

中文翻译：

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实际年龄对母语和非母语句子处理的影响：来自德语主谓一致的证据

摘要 虽然人们对老龄化的多语言个体的认知给予了很多关注，但对年龄如何影响他们的语法加工知之甚少。我们使用二元选择句子完成任务以及各种个体差异测试评估了六十个母语（L1）和六十个非母语（L2）德语（年龄：18-84）的人的主题 - 动词数量 - 协议处理. 我们的结果揭示了年龄对 L1 和 L2 说话者的准确性和反应时间 (RT) 的不同影响。L1 说话者的 RT 随年龄增长而增加，并且他们更容易受到吸引错误的影响。相比之下，L2 说话者的 RT 会降低，一旦与年龄相关的减慢得到控制，他们的整体准确性就会提高。我们将此解释为 L2 暴露增加所致。而且，与 L1 说话者相比，L2 说话者的准确性/RT 模式受认知变量（工作记忆、干扰控制）的影响更大。我们的研究结果表明，就双语者的语法处理能力而言，衰老与获得（经验）和损失（认知能力）有关。