Electrophysiological evidence for age-related changes in event knowledge use during language comprehension.

Abstract

General event knowledge can be rapidly used during language comprehension and shapes word understanding. However, little is known about how event knowledge use might be affected by normal aging, which is associated with increases in world knowledge but decreases in fluid abilities. We measured event-related brain potentials, focusing on N400 potentials (neuroelectric markers of semantic processing) and post-N400 late positive complexes, as younger (aged 18-30; N = 24) and older (aged 53-80; N = 30) adult participants read short descriptions of real-world scenarios ending with the most predictable word or one of two types of contextually anomalous words, either related or unrelated to the event being described. For young adults, as previously reported (Metusalem et al., 2012), N400s were reduced to predictable compared to anomalous words and, among anomalous words, were reduced for those related to the event compared to unrelated anomalies. Older adults also showed N400 reductions for predictable compared to anomalous words but not for anomalous but event-related words compared to unrelated anomalies. Among older adults, age was negatively correlated with N400 effects of event-relatedness. Thus, whereas young adults seemed to broadly activate and maintain information about an event being described, even when it was linguistically infelicitous, older adults did not. However, older adults did differentiate the two types of anomalous words in a later time window (late positive complex), showing they eventually (likely more explicitly) appreciated the event-related relationships (after reading the related anomaly). These results thus suggest that the immediate availability of event knowledge during language comprehension is impacted by normal aging. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).