Age Differences in the Effects of Conceptual Integration Training on Resource Allocation in Sentence Processing
Open Access
- 1 July 2010
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
- Vol. 63 (7), 1430-1455
- https://doi.org/10.1080/17470210903330983
Abstract
This research examined age differences in the accommodation of reading strategies as a consequence of explicit instruction in conceptual integration. In Experiment 1, young, middle-aged, and older adults read sentences for delayed recall using a moving-window method. Readers in an experimental group received instruction in making conceptual links during reading while readers in a control group were simply encouraged to allocate effort. Regression analysis to decompose word-by-word reading times in each condition isolated the time allocated to conceptual processing at the point in the text at which new concepts were introduced, as well as at clause and sentence boundaries. While younger adults responded to instructions by differentially allocating effort to sentence wrap-up, older adults allocated effort to intrasentence wrap-up and on new concepts as they were introduced, suggesting that older readers optimized their allocation of effort to linguistic computations for textbase construction within their processing capacity. Experiment 2 verified that conceptual integration training improved immediate recall among older readers as a consequence of engendering allocation to conceptual processing.Keywords
This publication has 75 references indexed in Scilit:
- Effects of context on eye movements when reading about possible and impossible events.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2008
- Self-regulated reading in adulthood.Psychology and Aging, 2008
- An investigation of concurrent ERP and self‐paced reading methodologiesPsychophysiology, 2007
- Younger and Older Adults' "Good-Enough" Interpretations of Garden-Path SentencesDiscourse Processes, 2006
- Aging and self-regulated language processing.Psychological Bulletin, 2006
- Adult age differences in the effects of goals on self-regulated sentence processing.Psychology and Aging, 2006
- Age differences in reading time allocation for propositionally dense sentencesAging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 1994
- Enhancing older adults' reading comprehensionDiscourse Processes, 1993
- Eye movements and on-line language comprehension processesLanguage and Cognitive Processes, 1989
- Syntactic complexity and elderly adults' prose recallExperimental Aging Research, 1987