One hundred twenty-seven individuals who ranged in age from 18 to 90 years
were tested on a reading span test and on measures of on-line and off-line
sentence processing efficiency. Older participants had reduced working-memo
ry spans compared with younger participants. The on-line measures were sens
itive to local increases in processing load, and the off-line measures were
sensitive to the syntactic complexity of the sentences. Older and younger
participants showed similar effects of syntactic complexity on the on-line
measures. There was some evidence that older participants were more affecte
d than younger participants by syntactic complexity on the off-line measure
s. The results support the hypothesis that on-line processes involved in re
cognizing linguistic forms and determining the literal, preferred, discours
e-coherent meaning of sentences constitute a domain of language processing
that relies on its own processing resource or working-memory system.