Imagine your brain as a bustling city, with different neighborhoods dedicated to specific tasks. Well, when it comes to processing sentences, it turns out that young brains and older brains have different neighborhoods! A team of scientists studied the effects of aging on sentence comprehension by looking at brain activity using event-related potentials. They found that older adults experienced a delay in their brain response when determining the plausibility of sentences compared to younger adults. But here’s the interesting part: even though both groups showed similar magnitudes of brain response at the sensor level, the areas of the brain involved were different. The younger group activated regions associated with language processing, while the older group relied more on regions involved in general cognitive tasks. So, it’s like they were using different roads within their brain cities to arrive at the same understanding! These findings shed light on how our brains change as we age and could help improve our understanding of age-related language difficulties. Curious to dive deeper into this fascinating research? Check out the full article using the link below!

Age-related differences in sentence-level lexical-semantic processes have been extensively studied, based on the N400 component of event-related potential (ERP). However, there is still a lack of understanding in this regard at the brain-region level. This study explores aging effects on sentence-level semantic processing by comparing the characteristics of the N400 ERP component and brain engagement patterns within individual N400 time windows for two age groups (16 younger adults aged 24.38 ± 3.88 years and 15 older adults aged 67.00 ± 5.04 years) during sentence processing with different plausibility conditions. Our results demonstrated that the N400 effect according to the plausibility condition occurred in different temporal windows in the two age groups, with a delay in the older group. Moreover, it was identified that there was a distinct difference between the groups in terms of the source location of the condition-dependent N400 effect even though no significant difference was derived in its magnitude itself at the sensor-level. Interestingly, the source analysis results indicated that the two groups involved different functional networks to resolve the same semantic violations: the younger group activated the regions corresponding to the typical lexical-semantic network more, whereas the older group recruited the regions belonging to the multiple-demand network more. The findings of this study could be used as a basis for understanding the aging brain in a linguistic context.

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