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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the results of an experimental study whose purpose is to determine whether normal cognitive aging affects older adult's processing of ambiguous garden path sentences. The hypothesis that is tested empirically postulates that the reduction in the capacity of working memory due to normal cognitive aging produces a decline in the ambiguous garden path syntactic structure processing, which would eventually affect sentence comprehension. The experiment compares the performance of 39 young adults and 31 older adults in a timed reading comprehension task of sentences that contain direct object /subject temporary syntactic ambiguity (Mientras la joven montaba el potro fue robado de las caballerizas, While the girl was riding the horse was stolen from the stables). Each sentence was followed by a comprehension task. The analysis of the differences in reading times and sentence comprehension partially confirms the hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the problem of readability is studied from a psycholinguistic perspective. Readability is the intrinsic difficulty of texts to be understood. The aim of this study was to determine to what extent the readability of a text depends not only on its structural properties (linguistic complexity), but also the skills of the reader and the nature of comprehension tasks. An experimental research was carried out, in which two reading comprehension tests were developed by manipulating the complexity of texts. The tests included items to measure various aspects of comprehension according to an evaluation model based on a theoretical psycholinguistic approach. The tests were applied to 208 participants in three different types of schools. The results confirmed the hypothesis that the readability of texts depends not only on the textual properties, but also on the relationship of these with the readers' characteristics and the comprehension tasks defined in the tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]