Sentence production by elder and young adults under a controlled situation

Abstract

We present an experiment that compares young and older adults in a sentence production task based on stimulus-words. Type of verb (transitive, intransitive, transitive with direct object) and the number of stimuli (2, 3) are tested. Data shows no significant difference between age groups both in the syntactic complexity and propositional density of the sentences produced, nor on the planning and production time periods. Only response errors were different for older and younger participants. Results are discussed in the light of theoretical cognitive aging and its effect on language production processes.