Age differences in spoken language comprehension: verb-argument and formality-register congruence influence real-time sentence processing
Academic Article
Using the Visual World Paradigm, we investigated participants’ processing of formality register and verb-argument (in)congruent sentences. Crucially, we tested whether individual differences influence sentence processing by taking participants’ age (18–45 years) and their social status (high vs. low) into account. Participants listened to German context sentences that set up formal (e.g. Elegantly dressed says Peter:) or informal (e.g. Sloppily dressed rambles Peter:) situations while they looked at images that were associated either with a formal (e.g. a pair of fancy shoes and chic clothes) or informal (e.g. a pair of old shoes and casual clothes) context. Following the context sentence, they listened to a German target sentence (e.g. I’m soon tying my shoescolloquial). The verb in the target sentence imposed semantic constraints on its arguments (e.g. tie has a good semantic fit with shoes but fits less well with clothes). The on-screen images represented candidate post-verbal referents (e.g. shoes or clothes), creating semantic congruence between the verb constraints and two out of four candidate referents. This verb-argument congruence factor was crossed with congruence between the formality of the context sentence and the (informal vs. more formal) register of the post-verbal argument (e.g. shoesstandard vs. shoescolloquial). Our results show that participants take the formality of the context into account to inform anticipation of matching images on the screen. Moreover, the older the participants were, the more they took the formality of the context into account. All participants made use of the verb’s restrictions: They anticipated and integrated the named object noun argument. Crucially, only younger but not middle-aged participants made use of the context sentence formality to further inform expectations of verb-argument congruence. Participants’ social status did not influence register and verb-argument sentence processing.
