Use of adjectives in prediction during spoken language comprehension in older adults: Evidence from anticipatory eye-movements

Previous research suggests that while cognitive abilities decline with age, semantic and verbal knowledge remain stable or may even improve with age. The present study investigated how aging impacts anticipation during comprehension, considering that both language experience and cognitive factors modulates prediction during comprehension. We investigated whether older adults can utilize gender-marked adjectives to predict the target noun during Hindi sentence comprehension. Two visual world paradigm studies (Experiment 1 & 2) were conducted, where young and older adults listened to sentences containing a target word while looking a visual display containing the target object along with three distractors. The sentences consisted of adjectives which were highly associated with the target object. We measured anticipatory gaze towards the target object before it was mentioned in the sentence indexing prediction using adjective. The results from both experiments showed that older adults exhibited anticipatory gaze towards the target noun soon after hearing adjective, which did not differ from that of young adults. The findings provide robust evidence that older adults can effectively use semantic, syntactic or associative information from the adjective to predict the target noun, similar to young adults. The present findings show that older adults can generate prediction using their world knowledge and accumulated language experience throughout their lives.