Effects of Age and Working Memory Load on Syntactic Processing: An Event-Related Potential Study
archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified
Get this paper ↗ (DOI — opens at the source; we link to it, we don't host it)
Summary
This study investigates how normal aging and working memory (WM) load interact to influence syntactic processing during sentence comprehension. Motivated by the hypothesis that age-related WM decline impairs the ability to maintain linguistic features in memory, the researchers examined whether increasing the distance between agreeing lexical units (noun and adjective) would exacerbate processing difficulties in older adults compared to young adults. The experiment utilized event-related potentials (ERPs) to measure neural responses in 60 native Spanish speakers: 30 older adults (mean age 66.06) and 30 young adults (mean age 25.7). Participants performed a grammaticality judgment task, reading sentences that varied by gender agreement (agree vs. disagree) and WM load (low vs. high). WM load was manipulated by inserting an embedded clause between the noun and adjective in high-load conditions, thereby increasing the syntactic distance. Behavioral data included reaction times and accuracy, while EEG data focused on the Left-Anterior Negativity (LAN, 300–500 ms) and P600 components (P600a: 500–700 ms; P600b: 700–900 ms), which index morpho-syntactic processing and syntactic reanalysis, respectively. Behavioral results indicated no significant difference in accuracy between age groups; however, older adults exhibited significantly longer reaction times across all conditions. Electrophysiologically, older adults displayed a distinct ERP pattern under high WM load. Specifically, they showed smaller LAN amplitudes compared to young adults, suggesting greater difficulty in processing morpho-syntactic features when memory demands were high. Additionally, older adults demonstrated reduced amplitudes for both P600a and P600b components in the high WM load condition. The smaller P600a and P600b effects are interpreted as difficulties in integrating sentence context and mapping sentence constituents during reanalysis. The findings conclude that while older adults maintain accurate syntactic judgments, increased WM load imposes a subtle but measurable processing cost, evidenced by slower reaction times and attenuated ERP components. This suggests that age-related WM limitations do not necessarily cause outright comprehension failures but rather increase the cognitive effort required for syntactic integration and reanalysis. The study highlights the utility of ERP subcomponents in detecting age-related neural changes in language processing that are not visible in behavioral accuracy alone.
Provenance
The full processing record for this entry. Every stage of this paper's journey through the pipeline is logged — what ran, with which tool and model, how many attempts it took, and when it last completed.
| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | Crossref | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-19 |
| archive | success | canonical_url | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-26 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-20 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-20 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-06-20 |
| enrich | success | openalex | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-20 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-19 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 6 | 2026-06-20 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-26; verification: verified.
Topics
Ranked by relevance to this paper. Hover a topic for its definition.