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Neural response of pragmatic inference in young and older adults: Evidence from ERP data
Poster A12 in Poster Session A, Tuesday, October 24, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Wangshu Feng1, Xiaokun Zhang1, Weijuan Wang1, Lin Fan1; 1Beijing Foreign Studies University
In verbal communication, a speaker often uses utterances with implicit meaning, which requires listeners to interpret via pragmatic inference. As individuals age, their ability to make efficient and accurate pragmatic inferences may decline, leading to communication difficulties and misunderstandings. Considering the fact that the cognitive neural mechanism has not yet been fully revealed, this paper aims to comprehensively employ EEG recording to probe into the cognitive aging phenomenon of pragmatic reasoning and the cognitive neural mechanisms behind it from the perspective of meaning understanding. The current research investigated the effect of age and the contextual relevance in utterances on pragmatic inference. In each set of scenarios, a certain utterance has different meanings regarding the preceding yes-no question. According to its contextual relevance, an utterance served as a direct reply (DR), a moderately indirect reply (MIR), or a highly indirect reply (HIR). During the EEG recording, participants read the scenarios and were asked to make binary judgments as to whether the speaker wanted to say ‘‘yes” or ‘‘no” to the preceding question in 1/3 of the trials. The behavioral and event-related potentials (ERP) data were collected and analyzed from nineteen elderly participants (14 females, range 57-78 years, mean age 67.4 years) and twenty-three youngsters (19 females, range 18-23 years, mean age 19 years). The behavioral data showed that the task accuracy for the indirect reply conditions by the young group is significantly higher than that of the elderly group. These results showed that elder people have difficulties in comprehending indirect speech. Furthermore, the ERP data showed that, for both the elderly group and the young group, compared with the direct replies, indirect replies elicited an increased late positive component in the middle and later stages of reply presentation. For the young group, however, indirect replies triggered a greater N400 effect than direct answers in the early and middle stages of reply presentation, while the elderly group did not. These findings illustrated that the pragmatic inference ability of elderly individuals is reduced compared with youngsters, because it was difficult for them to enrich the semantic content of the current utterance in real time. It will provide an important psychological theoretical basis for understanding the verbal communication difficulties of the elderly.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics, Language Development/Acquisition