Differential age effects on semantic and syntactic priming

Adult age differences in the processing of semantic and syntactic informati on during language comprehension were investigated in a lexical decision ta sk in which the target word was preceded by a sentence fragment. Sentence f ragment and target were presented visually and made up either a correct or an incorrect sentence containing either a semantic violation (selectional r estriction violation) or a syntactic violation (subcategorisation violation ). Experiment 1 revealed a differential age effect for the processing of sy ntactic, but not for the processing of semantic violations. Experiment 2, u sing visually degraded targets, demonstrated that this differential effect was independent of peripheral processing aspects, such as visual encoding. Experiment 3 including a neutral baseline condition revealed that the diffe rential age effect on syntactic processing was due to controlled rather tha n to automatic aspects of priming, as it was observed for the cost componen t, but not for the benefit component. Experiment 4 revealed that this effec t was independent of the timing parameters used for stimulus presentation. It appears that age can have differential effects on specific cognitive dom ains, such as syntax and semantics. This may be attributable to the amount of controlled processes involved in syntactic and semantic priming.