Using event-related potentials(ERPs),the present study explores the effects of aging on the processing of Chinese causal complex sentences.The experimental results show that older adults have longer response time and lower accuracy rate when judging the plausibility of causal complex sentences compared to younger adults.When reading critical words in implau-sible causal sentences,older adults don't show a significant N400 component but a widespread late positive complex(LPC),whereas younger adults show an N400 component only on the left brain.This finding suggests a decline in language compre-hension in the older adults when reading Chinese causal complex sentences,which may be due to the fact that the processing efficiency of older adults decreases,and that they are unable to effectively utilize the context to predict and process the critical words immediately.Thus,when the critical words are incongruent with the previous context,older adults don't show an obvi-ous N400 effect,and they must reanalyze the words at a later stage,which gives rise to an LPC effect.
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万方数据
