ABSTRACT

We investigated the effect of healthy ageing on the lexical and syntactic processes involved in sentence production. Young and older adults completed a semantic interference sentence production task: we manipulated whether the target picture and distractor word were semantically related or unrelated and whether they fell within the same phrase (“the watch and the clock/hippo move apart”) or different phrases (“the watch moves above the clock/hippo”). Both age groups were slower to initiate sentences containing a larger, compared to a smaller, initial phrase, indicating a similar phrasal scope of advanced planning. However, older adults displayed significantly larger semantic interference effects (slower to initiate sentences when the target picture and distractor word were related) than young adults, indicating an age-related increase in lexical competition. Thus, while syntactic planning is preserved with age, older speakers encounter problems managing the temporal co-activation of competing lexical items during sentence production.

摘要

我们调查了健康老龄化对句子产生所涉及的词汇和句法过程的影响。年轻人和老年人完成了一项语义干扰造句任务：我们操纵目标图片和干扰词在语义上是相关还是不相关，它们是否属于同一个短语（“手表和时钟/河马分开”）或不同的短语（“手表在时钟/河马上方移动”）。与较小的初始短语相比，两个年龄组在启动包含较大短语的句子时都较慢，这表明高级计划的短语范围相似。然而，与年轻人相比，老年人表现出明显更大的语义干扰效应（当目标图片和干扰词相关时，启动句子的速度较慢），表明与年龄相关的词汇竞争增加。因此，虽然句法规划随着年龄的增长而保留，但年长的说话者在句子产生期间遇到管理竞争词汇项的时间共同激活的问题。