Acceso usuarios
Eugenia Rivieri, Pedro Alfaro Faccio
El funcionamiento del lenguaje en la vejez suele asociarse a las variaciones de los sistemas de memoria durante la vida. Sin embargo, aún se debate qué aspectos del procesamiento del lenguaje se relacionan con los diferentes tipos de memoria. Respecto de la sintaxis se discute su (no) relación con la memoria de trabajo. En este marco, el objetivo de esta investigación consistió en determinar la relación entre el procesamiento sintáctico y la memoria de trabajo en adultos mayores saludables. Para ello, se evaluó a un grupo de 30 adultos mayores, entre 65 y 75 años, y a otro de 30 jóvenes, entre 20 y 30 años, mediante una tarea de distancia lineal en la que se manipuló el número de elementos intervinientes entre el núcleo del sintagma nominal sujeto y el núcleo del sintagma verbal. Luego, se les administró la subprueba de memoria de trabajo de dígitos inversos y secuenciación, Escala IV de Inteligencia de Wechsler. Los resultados indicaron que, pese a las diferencias en el rendimiento entre los grupos en las tareas de memoria de trabajo y procesamiento sintáctico, no existe una correlación entre esta memoria y distancia lineal. Tampoco existe relación entre la variación de las distancias y las respuestas correctas/incorrectas. Esto indicaría que la retención e integración de la información léxica dispuesta linealmente no es relevante para el procesamiento de la concordancia y para la comprensión de oraciones independientemente de la edad.
Broadly stated, variations in language functioning in ageing are often associated with variations in memory systems during the life span. However, it is still discussed which aspects of language processing are related to the different types of memory. Regarding syntax there is a debate about its relationship to working memory or its independence from it, although it seems logical to think that there is a co-dependence. In this context, the aim of this research was to determine the relationship between syntactic processing and working memory in healthy older adults. For this purpose, it was designed an experimental study with a group of 30 healthy older adults (HOA), aged between 65 and 75, and a group of 30 young people, aged between 20 and 30, both with more than 12 years of formal education. A Montreal cognitive assessment / MoCA-test was also applied to include/exclude participants. They were first tested by means of a linear distance task which consisted of 27 sentences. The number of intervening elements (9, 11 or 13) between the head of the subject nominal syntagm and the head of the verb syntagm of these stimuli varied. These distances (1), (2) and (3) were assigned an ascending value to differentiate the degrees of comprehension of each one. The possible influence of sentence type was also controlled by keeping the same syntactic structure.
Additionally, 54 filler sentences were incorporated, which generated a task of 81 sentences in total. Following the proposal of Sevilla et al. (2008), the stimuli were organized and presented in 3 groups of 27 sentences, randomly formed for each of the participants. These stimuli were presented on a computer screen, through a self-administered reading comprehension task, in which a fixation point was presented before the block of 27 sentences, then a random sentence and a question and its correct/incorrect alternatives. It should be noted that the transition between the stimulus sentence and the comprehension question was made by the participant, once he/she felt that he/she had understood the content. Then, participants took the working memory subtests of the WAIS IV memory test, specifically reverse digits, and sequencing. Once the data had been obtained, five inferential statistical analyses were carried out: it was determined two Mann-Whitney tests to compare the media between HOA and the young people group, one for the working memory task and the other for the distance linear one; a Spearman correlation for each group, and, finally, a Chi-square test to determine the relation between distance variation and correct/incorrect answers. The results indicated that, although differences in performance were observed between the groups in the working memory tasks, there was no correlation between working memory and linear distance. It was also observed that there is no relationship between distance variation and correct/incorrect answers. The data indicate that syntactic processing - understood in terms of length - is preserved in healthy old age despite the decline in working memory. Thus, despite the decline in working memory capacity in healthy older adults compared to young people and what this implies for language processing efficiency, healthy older adults did not show difficulty in processing different utterances - independent of the 3 distances - as suggested by the results on sentence comprehension. This seems to indicate that the retention and integration of linearly displayed lexical information is not relevant for processing agreement and for sentence comprehension regardless de age.
