An Experimental Paradigm for Measuring the Effects of Ageing on Sentence Processing

Previous studies have found that older adults have greater difficulties in processing syntactically complex sentences than younger adults. However, the ...

Experimental Paradigm for Measuring the Effect of Induced Emotion on Grammar Learning

Previous studies have found that emotion has significant influence on the learning of foreign language vocabulary and textual comprehension. However, ...

Investigating the Effects of Emotion on Language Learning Using an Odor-Based Induction Method

Emotion has important influence on language learning. However, the effect of emotion on syntactic learning has been relatively under-researched. Most ...

Beijing Foreign Studies University

Emotions have crucial influence on vocabulary learning and text comprehension. However, whether morphosyntactic learning is influenced by emotional conditions has remained largely unclear. In this study, we investigated how induced positive and negative emotions affect the learning of morphosyntactic rules in a foreign language. It was found that negative emotion increased the accuracy and efficiency of syntactic learning, but had no significant effect on the learning of morphological marking rules. Positive emotion was not found to be significantly associated with learning outcomes. The findings shed light on the effects of affective states on the structural aspects of foreign language learning.

The effect of emotion on morphosyntactic learning in foreign language learners.

Animate nouns are preferred for grammatical subjects, whereas inanimate nouns are preferred for grammatical objects. Animacy provides important semantic cues for sentence comprehension. However, how individuals' ability to use this animacy cue changes with advancing age is still not clear. The current study investigated whether older adults and younger adults were differentially sensitive to this semantic constraint in processing Mandarin relative clauses, using a self-paced reading paradigm. The sentences used in the study contained subject relative clauses or object relative clauses and had animate or inanimate subjects. The results indicate that the animacy manipulation affected the younger adults more than the older adults in online processing. Younger adults had longer reading times for all segments in subject relative clauses than in object relative clauses when the subjects were inanimate, whereas there was no significant difference in reading times between subject and object relative clauses when the subjects were animate. In the older group, animacy was not found to influence the processing difficulty of subject relative clauses and object relative clauses. Compared with younger adults, older adults were less sensitive to animacy constraints in relative clause processing. The findings indicate that the use of animacy cues became less efficient in the ageing population. The results can be explained by the capacity constrained comprehension theory, according to which older adults have greater difficulty in integrating semantic information with syntactic processing due to the lack of sufficient cognitive resources.

Age differences in the effect of animacy on Mandarin sentence processing.

In sentences with long-distance dependency relations (""), there are two kinds of distance between the gap (object position of ) and the filler : linear (the intervening words in linear order), and structural (the intervening nodes in the syntactic tree). Previous studies found that older adults have difficulty comprehending sentences with long-distance dependency relations. However, it is not clear whether they are more disrupted by longer structural distance between gaps and fillers, or longer linear distance. There is a distinction between linear distance and structural distance, in that the former is directly related to working memory whereas the latter is associated with syntactic ability. By examining the effect of linear distance and structural distance on sentence processing by older adults, we can identify whether age-related decline in sentence comprehension is attributed to working memory dysfunction or syntactic decline. For this purpose, structural distance and linear distance were manipulated in Mandarin relative clauses (RCs). 30 older adults and 33 younger adults were instructed to perform a self-paced reading task. We found that both groups performed more slowly as structural distance increased, and less accurately when linear distance increased. More importantly, there was a significant interaction between linear distance and age group in the accuracy of comprehension, with linear distance disrupting older adults more than younger adults in offline processing. The findings suggest that the age-related decline in offline sentence comprehension might be attributable to the decline in working memory, rather than syntactic ability. Practical implications, limitations, and directions for future studies are discussed.

The Effect of Distance on Sentence Processing by Older Adults.

Sentence comprehension is diminished in patients with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT). However, the underlying reason for such deficits is still not entirely clear. The Syntactic Deficit Hypothesis attributes sentence comprehension deficits in DAT patients to the impairment in syntactic ability, whereas the Processing Resource Deficit Hypothesis proposes that sentence comprehension deficits are the result of working memory deficiency. This study investigated the deficits in sentence comprehension in Chinese-speaking DAT patients with different degrees of severity using sentence-picture matching tasks. The study revealed a significant effect of syntactic complexity in patients and healthy controls, but the effect was stronger in patients than in healthy controls. When working memory demand was minimized, the effect of syntactic complexity was only significant in patients with moderate DAT, but not in healthy controls or those with mild DAT. The findings suggest that in patients with mild DAT, working memory decline was the major source of sentence comprehension difficulty and in patients with moderate DAT, working memory decline and syntactic impairment jointly contributed to the impairments in sentence comprehension. The source of sentence comprehension deficits varied with degree of dementia severity.

Xinmiao Liu

School of English for Specific Purposes

Beijing Foreign Studies University

An Experimental Paradigm for Measuring the Effects of Ageing on Sentence Processing

Experimental Paradigm for Measuring the Effect of Induced Emotion on Grammar Learning

Investigating the Effects of Emotion on Language Learning Using an Odor-Based Induction Method

Xinmiao Liu

.css-o250i3{font-size:18px;font-family:Open Sans,sans-serif;line-height:21.6px;}School of English for Specific Purposes

Beijing Foreign Studies University

An Experimental Paradigm for Measuring the Effects of Ageing on Sentence Processing

Experimental Paradigm for Measuring the Effect of Induced Emotion on Grammar Learning

Investigating the Effects of Emotion on Language Learning Using an Odor-Based Induction Method

School of English for Specific Purposes