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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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| Aging and resolution of quantifier scope effects | | Author(s) | Karen A Kemtes, Susan Kemper |
| Journal title | The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, vol 54B, no 6, November 1999 |
| Pages | pp P350-360 |
| Keywords | Cognitive processes ; Mental ageing ; Young adults [20-25] ; Age groups [elderly] ; United States of America. |
| Annotation | Two experiments compared young and older adults' processing of complex sentences involving quantifier scope ambiguities. Young adults were hypothesised to use a mix of syntactic processing strategies to interpret sentences such as "Every actor used a prop" or "An actor used every prop". Older adults, particularly those with limited working memories, were hypothesised to rely on a simple pragmatic principle. Participants read the quantifier sentences and judged whether a continuation sentence "made sense". Reading times for the quantifier sentences and decision times and continuation sentence acceptability judgements were analysed. Whereas young and older adults exhibited similar patterns of reading times for the quantifier sentences, they preferred different continuations for the "Every ... a" sentences. As predicted, both age groups interpreted a quantifier sentence as referring to a single entity. In contrast, the two groups made different interpretations of a quantifier sentence: young adults preferred continuations postulating multiple entities, whereas older adults particularly those with working memory limitations preferred continuations with a single entity. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-000306223 A |
| Classmark | DA: D6: SD6: BB: 7T |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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