The broad purpose of the proposed research is to contribute to the understanding of cognitive aging in terms of the elemental processing systems that serve language :comprehension. For both young and healthy elderly adults, the research will focus on the temporal parameters of information access for isolated words; on the manner by which information provided by sentence context interacts in real-time with word meaning activation; on real-time syntactic analysis; and on real-time inference formation at the level of discourse. The research will also examine if increased memory loads differentially affect processing at the syntactic and discourse levels and if young and healthy elderly adults fare differently in the face of increased memory loads at each of these two levels. This program of research should yield information of potential relevance to the formation of screening devices for distinguishing early signs of pathological aging from normal age-related changes, allowing an assessment of subtle alterations to processing resources, before they become evident in every-day behavior.
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