Individual Differences in Peripheral Hearing and Cognition Reveal Sentence Processing Differences in Healthy Older Adults

Ira Kurthen; Martin Meyer; Matthias Schlesewsky; Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky

doi:10.3389/fnins.2020.573513

Individual Differences in Peripheral Hearing and Cognition Reveal Sentence Processing Differences in Healthy Older Adults

Front Neurosci. 2020 Oct 16:14:573513. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2020.573513. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Ira Kurthen¹, Martin Meyer^{2

3}, Matthias Schlesewsky⁴, Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky⁴

Affiliations

¹ Developmental Psychology: Infancy and Childhood, Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
² Neuropsychology, Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
³ Cognitive Psychology Unit, Institute of Psychology, University of Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria.
⁴ Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience Research Hub, University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia.

Abstract

When viewed cross-sectionally, aging seems to negatively affect speech comprehension. However, aging is a heterogeneous process, and variability among older adults is typically large. In this study, we investigated language comprehension as a function of individual differences in older adults. Specifically, we tested whether hearing thresholds, working memory, inhibition, and individual alpha frequency would predict event-related potential amplitudes in response to classic psycholinguistic manipulations at the sentence level. Twenty-nine healthy older adults (age range 61-76 years) listened to English sentences containing reduced relative clauses and object-relative clauses while their electroencephalogram was recorded. We found that hearing thresholds and working memory predicted P600 amplitudes early during reduced relative clause processing, while individual alpha frequency predicted P600 amplitudes at a later point in time. The results suggest that participants with better hearing and larger working memory capacity simultaneously activated both the preferred and the dispreferred interpretation of reduced relative clauses, while participants with worse hearing and smaller working memory capacity only activated the preferred interpretation. They also suggest that participants with a higher individual alpha frequency had a higher likelihood of successfully reanalysing the sentence toward the reduced relative clause reading than participants with a lower individual alpha frequency. By contrast, we found no relationship between object-relative clause processing and working memory or hearing thresholds. Taken together, the results support the view that older adults employ different strategies during auditory sentence processing dependent on their hearing and cognitive abilities and that there is no single ability that uniformly predicts sentence processing outcomes.

Keywords: cognition; event-related potential; hearing loss; normal aging; sentence processing.