The effects of ageing and visual noise on conceptual integration during sentence reading
The effortfulness hypothesis implies that difficulty in decoding the
surface form, as in the case of age-related sensory limitations or
background noise, consumes the attentional resources that are then
unavailable for semantic integration in language comprehension. Because
ageing is associated with sensory declines, degrading of the surface
form by a noisy background can pose an extra challenge for older adults.
In two experiments, this hypothesis was tested in a self-paced moving
window paradigm in which younger and older readers' online allocation of
attentional resources to surface decoding and semantic integration was
measured as they read sentences embedded in varying levels of visual
noise. When visual noise was moderate (Experiment 1), resource
allocation among young adults was unaffected but older adults allocated
more resources to decode the surface form at the cost of resources that
would otherwise be available for semantic processing; when visual noise
was relatively intense (Experiment 2), both younger and older
participants allocated more attention to the surface form and less
attention to semantic processing. The decrease in attentional allocation
to semantic integration resulted in reduced recall of core ideas in both
experiments, suggesting that a less organized semantic representation
was constructed in noise. The greater vulnerability of older adults at
relatively low levels of noise is consistent with the effortfulness
hypothesis.
Share this page