Language comprehension in aging

There is a lot of evidence that sentence comprehension ability declines in normally aging adults. This chapter reviews variables that contribute to age-related declines in comprehension. Older adults recognize words and parse sentences more slowly than younger adults, and make more comprehension errors. These changes in comprehension ability have been associated with age-related declines in general cognitive processes, such as working memory, and in perceptual abilities, such as hearing acuity. This chapter also considers the possibility that older adults use their language expertise to compensate for age-related declines in comprehension ability.