an-experimental-paradigm-for-measuring-effects-ageing-on-sentence

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 ...

Qufu Normal 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.

Haiyan Wang

Institute of Language and Brain Science,
School of Translation Studies,
Institute of Language and Brain Science, School of Translation Studies

Qufu Normal University

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

Haiyan Wang

.css-o250i3{font-size:18px;font-family:Open Sans,sans-serif;line-height:21.6px;}Institute of Language and Brain Science,School of Translation Studies,Institute of Language and Brain Science, School of Translation Studies

Qufu Normal University

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

Institute of Language and Brain Science,
School of Translation Studies,
Institute of Language and Brain Science, School of Translation Studies