Abstract

The understanding and meaning of text arise from the construction of multiple levels of representation. It is well-documented in particular that the processes at the level of textbase, the propositional representation of the semantic content of the text, undergo age-related declines. To alleviate this difficulty in older adults, it has been suggested that greater effort be allocated to textbase processes, such as conceptual integration at major syntactic (major noun phrases, clauses) and sentence boundaries (known as “wrap-up”), as a compensatory reading strategy. The present study examines age-related differences in the patterns of attention allocation during Korean sentence processing as well as in sentence comprehension and recall performance. Sixty younger and sixty-one older adults read two-sentence passages covering various topics for subsequent comprehension and recall. Clause-by-clause reading times were measured, and the reading times were decomposed from index attentional allocation to word- and textbase-level processes using regression analysis. The results were as follows: First, older adults showed greater allocation of attention to the word-level processes for orthographic decoding and lexical access than did younger adults; in the textbase-level processes, both age groups were more likely to wrap up at an intrasentence boundary when reading for recall than for comprehension. However, older adults showed reduced wrap-up at the sentence boundary than younger adults did; additionally, unlike younger adults, who disproportionately increased the resources they allocated to sentence wrap-up when reading for recall than for comprehension, older adults did not show any such difference between reading conditions. Second, older adults demonstrated lower levels of comprehension and recall, especially recall performance, than younger adults. Third, resources allocated to the intrasentence boundary wrap-up were positively associated with sentence comprehension in older adults, and resources allocated to wrap-up at the intrasentence and sentence boundary were positively associated with sentence recall in both younger and older adults. These results suggest that older and younger adults exhibit different patterns of resource allocation during sentence processing, and that pausing frequently within sentences for conceptual integration plays a beneficial role in sentence comprehension and recall for older adults.