BRAIN POTENTIALS (ERPS)--LANGUAGE, MEMORY, AND AGING

描述了一项为期五年的研究计划，旨在澄清 正常衰老与执行力(压抑、转移)的关系 关注、整合)和非执行(激活、存储、衰败) 工作记忆(WM)操作和语言理解。一直以来 建议随着年龄的增长，WM容量会减少，这是 不仅表现为更大的遗忘倾向，而且还表现为 理解结构复杂句子的难度增加 (理解)，从一种想法或行为迅速地转换到另一种 (注意转换)，以及忽略和/或抑制 是不相关的(抑制)。我们详细介绍了使用这两种方法进行的一系列实验 性能和电生理措施来测试这些建议。 事件相关脑电位(ERPs)将被记录在 年龄在20岁到90岁之间的正常人 语言材料和非语言材料。拟议的实验包括 WM和/或Long Term不同子组件的操作 记忆的具体目的是：(1)扩大我们对 年龄对阅读中嵌入关系从句句子的影响 说话；(2)确定老年人是否真的有问题 语言理解能力，因为这句话要求 加工对工作记忆中的巩固过程产生影响； 检验老年人与年轻人在以下方面的不同假设 回指指代词解析不可信的程度， 从而需要抑制先前的预期；(4)检查 假设抑制过程变得更慢和/或效率更低 同音异音字负向启动效应与年龄的关系 句子和词汇判断任务；(5)检验假设 老年人更难忽视和抑制无关的事情 使用广义“2-back”工作记忆范式的刺激属性 也使用非语言材料；(6)测试以下建议 由于抑制机制效率较低，年长的个体将 在验证探头时表现出比年轻人更大的“粉丝效应” 与他们学过的一系列命题相关的题目。 这项研究项目将完善电生理标记物 重要的认知功能与语言处理和 正常成人自始至终工作记忆和长时记忆的组织 生活。原则上，这些数据可以为最好的 针对老年人的语言材料的结构。此外，这一点 规范的数据库应该对评估青少年和青少年有价值 有衰老和语言处理障碍的老年人。

A five-year research program is described which is aimed at clarifying the relationships among normal aging, executive (suppression, shifting of focus, consolidation) and non-executive (activation, storage, decay) working memory (WM) operations, and language comprehension. It has been suggested that along with age comes a reduced WM capacity which is manifest not only in a greater tendency to forget but also in an increased difficulty making sense of structurally complex sentences (comprehension), in switching from one idea or action to another quickly (attentional switching), and in ignoring and/or suppressing that which is irrelevant (inhibition). We detail a series of experiments using both performance and electrophysiological measures to test these proposals. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) will be recorded from the scalp of normal human subjects between the ages of 20 and 90 as they process linguistic and non-linguistic materials. The proposed experiments include manipulations of the different subcomponents of WM and/or long term memory with the specific aims of: (1) extending our findings on the effects of aging on sentences with embedded relative clauses from reading to speech; (2) determining whether the elderly do indeed have problems with language comprehension because of the demands that sentence processing makes on consolidation processes in working memory; (3) testing the hypothesis that the elderly will differ from the young in anaphoric reference to the extent that pronoun resolution is implausible, thereby requiring inhibition of a prior expectation; (4) examining the hypothesis that inhibitory processes become slower and/or less efficient with advancing age by investigating negative priming with homophones in sentences and during a lexical decision task; (5) testing the hypothesis that the elderly have a harder time ignoring and inhibiting irrelevant stimulus attributes using a generalized "2-back" working memory paradigm with non-language materials as well; (6) testing the proposal that because of less efficient inhibitory mechanisms, older individuals will show larger "fan effects" than younger individuals in verifying probe items related to a series of propositions that they have been taught. This research project will refine electrophysiological markers of important cognitive functions in relation to language processing and organization of working and long-term memory in normal adults throughout life. These data can, in principle, offer guidelines on the best structure for language materials aimed at the elderly. Moreover, this normative data base should be of value for the assessment of young and old individuals with disorders of aging and language processing.