Aging, Auditory Distraction and Grammaticality Judgment

This study examined the effects of auditory distraction and short term memory on reaction times for normal individuals (ages 20-25 and 50-70) in a reading grammaticality judgment task. Subjects read whole sentences presented on computer screen and decided as quickly as possible whether each sentence was "good" (permissible in English) or "bad" (not permissible). Sentences were varied by grammaticality, reversibility, and location of extraneous words in relation to the grammatical constraint. The task was presented in quiet and in two levels of distraction. Results suggest age-related patterns of response to the stimulus variables in the face of auditory distraction