The purpose of the study was to investigate age-related differences in event-related potentials (ERP) components associated with processing of homonyms according to the context type of adnominal and verb phrases.
A total of 42 participants (Young=22,...
The purpose of the study was to investigate age-related differences in event-related potentials (ERP) components associated with processing of homonyms according to the context type of adnominal and verb phrases.
A total of 42 participants (Young=22, Elderly=20) take part in the study. Mean age of young groups was 27.59(SD=5.03), and that of elderly groups was 65.60(SD=2.46). The stimuli consisted of 120 Korean sentences containing homonyms as the ‘object’ of each sentence. The syntactic structure of these sentences was ‘subject / determiner / object / predicate (adverb / verb)’, and each sentence had two contexts. One was the adnominal phrase context that indicates ‘determiner’. The other was the verb phrase context that indicates ‘predicate’. Each context was biased toward dominant meaning or subdominant meaning. The target sentences were classified into four conditions depending on these contexts. Each condition consisted of 20 target sentences, resulting in a total of 80 stimuli with 40 filler sentences. The stimuli were presented in a word-by-word manner. After presentation of final word, participants were asked to judge the sentence plausibility. The electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded from 32 channels following the international 10-20 system, and mean amplitude was analyzed.
Behavioral results revealed that the elderly group showed significantly lower accuracy and slower reaction time than the younger group. In case of accuracy, the difference between groups depending on the adnominal phrase context and the verb phrase context was significant. But, in case of reaction time, the difference between groups depending on the adnominal phrase context was significant. ERP results revealed that, in case of young group, the N400 and P600 components emerged in dominant meaning of the adnominal phrase context, but the sustained negativity component emerged in subdominant meaning of the adnominal phrase context. N400 component is related with difficulties of lexical expectancy. P600 component reflects a monitoring process that triggers reanalysis when integration fails. In contrast, sustained negativity component reflects additional processing in the lexical level. In subdominant meaning of the adnominal phrase context, the processing was necessary to inhibit dominant meaning of homonyms always activated regardless of the precedence context. On the other hand, in case of elderly group, delayed N400 component emerged in both meaning of the adnominal phrase context, indicating that homonyms processing abilities were delayed and attenuated according to aging.
To conclude, the results of the present study provide ERP evidence for age-related differences of the representation and processing of homonyms depending upon contexts provided in sentences. That is, the age-related changes of on-line homonyms processing abilities may be responsible for worse performances of elderly adults on the off-line plausibility task compared to young adults.
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