Language comprehension in aging

DeDe, Gayle; Knilans, Jessica

doi:10.1075/z.200.05ded

In:Cognition, Language and Aging
Edited by Heather Harris Wright
[Not in series 200] 2016
► pp. 107–133

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Language comprehension in aging

Gayle DeDe | Temple University

Jessica Knilans | University of Arizona

Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 16 March 2016

https://doi.org/10.1075/z.200.05ded

There is a lot of evidence that sentence comprehension ability declines in normally aging adults. This chapter reviews variables that contribute to age-related declines in comprehension. Older adults recognize words and parse sentences more slowly than younger adults, and make more comprehension errors. These changes in comprehension ability have been associated with age-related declines in general cognitive processes, such as working memory, and in perceptual abilities, such as hearing acuity. This chapter also considers the possibility that older adults use their language expertise to compensate for age-related declines in comprehension ability.

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