RESULTS Aging, Resource Allocation, and Reading with Visual Noise Participants

Aging is associated with sensory declines that may make encoding of the surface form of language especially difficult. The Effortfulness Hypothesis (Wingfield et al., 2005) implies that word-level processing (e.g., signal decoding) may consume attentional resources among older readers and so decrease the capacity available for semantic integration of the textbase in language comprehension. In the current study, we tested this hypothesis by measuring readers ’ allocation of attentional resources to word and textbase features as they read sentences embedded in varying levels of visual noise, which would make signal decoding difficult