We investigated how phonologically similar words are encoded and retrieved from memory during sentence processing across younger and older adults. Critical sentences included two phonologically similar or dissimilar noun phrases (henceforth NPs) followed by a pronoun. We examined brain activity time-locked to the onsets of the second NP, and the pronoun to investigate the encoding and retrieval of the NPs, respectively. Encoding the second NP resulted in smaller N400 amplitudes when the preceding NP was phonologically similar, for both younger and older adults, suggesting age-invariant encoding facilitation with increasing phonological similarity. However, when processing the pronoun, younger adults exhibited greater negativity following phonologically similar NPs, suggesting retrieval difficulty, whereas older adults showed greater negativity for pronouns following dissimilar NPs, suggesting an apparent retrieval facilitation. A post-hoc behavioral experiment suggested that older adults perform shallow processing during retrieval. The results suggest age-related decline in retrieval, but not encoding, of phonological information.

我们调查了在年轻人和老年人的句子处理过程中，语音相似词是如何被编码和从记忆中检索出来的。关键句包括两个语音相似或不同的名词短语（以下简称 NP），后跟一个代词。我们检查了时间锁定到第二个 NP 发作的大脑活动，以及分别研究 NPs 的编码和检索的代词。当前一个 NP 在语音上相似时，编码第二个 NP 会导致更小的 N400 振幅，对于年轻人和老年人来说，这表明随着语音相似性的增加，年龄不变的编码促进作用。然而，在处理代词时，年轻人在语音相似的 NP 之后表现出更大的消极性，这表明检索困难，不相似的NP，表明明显的检索便利。一项事后行为实验表明，老年人在检索过程中进行了浅层处理。结果表明与年龄相关的语音信息检索下降，而不是编码下降。