Aging and resolution of quantifier scope effects

Two experiments were conducted to compare young and older adults' processin g of complex sentences involving quantifier scope ambiguities. Young adults were hypothesized to use a mix of syntactic processing strategies to inter pret sentences such as Every actor used a prop or An actor used every prop. Older adults, particularly those with limited working memories, were hypot hesized to rely on a simple pragmatic principle. Participants read the quan tifier sentences and judged whether a continuation sentence "made sense." R eading times for the quantifier sentences and decision times arid continuat ion sentence acceptability judgements were analyzed. Whereas young and olde r adults exhibited similar patterns of reading times for the quantifier sen tences, they preferred different continuations for the Every... a quantifie r sentences. As predicted, both young adults and older adults interpreted a quantifier sentence such as An actor used every prop as referring to a sin gle entity resulting in a preference for continuations such as The actor wa s on the stage. In contrast, young and older adults made different interpre tations of a quantifier sentence such as Every actor used a prop; young adu lts preferred continuations postulating multiple entities such as The props were on the stage whereas older adults, particularly those with working me mory limitations, preferred continuations with a single entity such as The prop was on the stage. These results support models of the effects of aging on language processing in which immediate syntactic analysis is Hot affect ed by aging or working memory limitations whereas postcomprehension process es are affected by aging and/or working memory limitations.