Syntactic prediction during self-paced reading is age invariant

Anticipatory prediction in older readers

It is well-established that skilled, young-adult readers rely on predictive processing during online language comprehension; however, fewer studies have investigated whether this extends to healthy, older adults (60 + years). The aim of the present research was to assess whether older readers make use of lexical prediction by investigating whether they demonstrate processing costs for incorrect predictions in a controlled experimental design. The eye movements of a sample of older adults (60-86 years) were recorded as they read strongly and weakly constraining sentences containing a predictable word or an unpredictable alternative that was either semantically related or unrelated. To determine whether predictive processing depends on the stimuli presentation format, a second experiment presented the same materials in a self-paced reading task in which each word of a sentence appears one at a time at the readers' own pace. Older adults showed processing benefits for expected input on eye-movement measures of reading. They also showed processing costs for unexpected input across both methodologies, but only when semantically unrelated to the best completion. Taken together, the results suggest that the use of predictive processes remains relatively preserved with age. The implications of these findings for understanding whether prediction is a fundamental component of online language comprehension are discussed.

Prediction in reading: A review of predictability effects, their theoretical implications, and beyond

Historically, prediction during reading has been considered an inefficient and cognitively expensive processing mechanism given the inherently generative nature of language, which allows upcoming text to unfold in an infinite number of possible ways. This article provides an accessible and comprehensive review of the psycholinguistic research that, over the past 40 or so years, has investigated whether readers are capable of generating predictions during reading, typically via experiments on the effects of predictability (i.e., how well a word can be predicted from its prior context). Five theoretically important issues are addressed: What is the best measure of predictability? What is the functional relationship between predictability and processing difficulty? What stage(s) of processing does predictability affect? Are predictability effects ubiquitous? What processes do predictability effects actually reflect? Insights from computational models of reading about how predictability manifests itself to facilitate the reading of text are also discussed. This review concludes by arguing that effects of predictability can, to a certain extent, be taken as demonstrating evidence that prediction is an important but flexible component of real-time language comprehension, in line with broader predictive accounts of cognitive functioning. However, converging evidence, especially from concurrent eye-tracking and brain-imaging methods, is necessary to refine theories of prediction.

Eye-movement reveals word order effects on comparative sentences in older adults using a verb-final language

Objectives

This study aimed to examine age-related differences in the comprehension of Korean comparative sentences with varying word orders by employing both offline and online measures, and to investigate how variations in word order affect sentence processing across different age groups.

Methods

A total of 52 monolingual native Korean speakers, 26 young adults, and 26 older adults, completed a sentence-picture-matching task under two word order conditions: comparative-first and nominative-first. Offline measures included accuracy and response time, while an online method involved eye-tracking within the Visual World Paradigm. Data analyses were performed using linear and generalized linear mixed-effects models.

Results

Older adults demonstrated lower accuracy and longer response times compared to younger individuals. Distinctive fixation patterns were observed, particularly in the sentential-final phrase, across different age groups. Specifically, nominative-first sentences elicited greater target advantage scores among younger adults, whereas older adults showed higher scores in comparative-first sentences.

Conclusion

The study highlights the potential of comparative sentences in elucidating age-related changes in sentence comprehension. These differences were evident not only in offline tasks but also in real-time processing, as evidenced by eye-tracking data. The findings suggest distinct processing strategies employed by young and older adults and underscore the importance of considering both syntactic and semantic cues in sentence comprehension.