PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Sophie M. Hardy
AU  - Katrien Segaert
AU  - Linda Wheeldon
TI  - Healthy Aging and Sentence Production: Disrupted Lexical Access in the Context of Intact Syntactic Planning
AID  - 10.1101/327304
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 327304
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/10/10/327304.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/10/10/327304.full
AB  - Fluent sentence production requires rapid syntax generation and word retrieval. We investigated how healthy aging affects these processes in two timed picture description tasks. In Experiment 1, young and older adults produced a syntactically related or unrelated prime prior to a target sentence (e.g., “the bell and the glove move up”). Both groups displayed significant facilitatory effects of priming on sentence onset latencies. In Experiment 2, participants produced sentences with initial coordinate or simple noun phrases (e.g., “the owl and the car move above the harp” / “the owl moves above the car and the harp”). On half the trials, the second picture (car) was previewed; critically, this previewed picture only fell within the initial phrase in the coordinate condition. Without preview, both age groups were slower to initiate sentences with larger coordinate phrases, suggesting a similar phrasal planning scope. However, age group differences did emerge in the preview conditions. Young adults displayed speed benefits of preview both within and outside the initial phrase. Whereas, older adults only displayed speed preview benefits within the initial phrase, and preview outside the initial phrase caused them to become significantly more error-prone. Thus, while syntactic planning scope appears unaffected by age, older adults do appear to encounter problems with managing the activation and integration of lexical items into syntactic structures. Taken together, our findings indicate that healthy aging disrupts the lexical, but not the syntactic, processes involved in sentence generation.