The purpose of current study is to investigate working memory and sentence comprehension in normal aging. Also, we identified which one is predictor variable of sentence comprehension and investigated the relationship between working memory and senten...
The purpose of current study is to investigate working memory and sentence comprehension in normal aging. Also, we identified which one is predictor variable of sentence comprehension and investigated the relationship between working memory and sentence comprehension. Therefore, to investigate working memory and sentence comprehension, subjects of this study are total 94 people from the age of 55 to 84 years old in the normal aging process. The results of this research are as follows.
First, the performance of 4 tasks for working memory(digit forward, digit backward, word forward, word backward) showed that younger group has higher score than older group. This result can be interpreted as supporting previous research that showed decline cognitive function due to aging process. However, after we controlled the year of education, age effect appears to be non-existent only in digit forward task. It means that when we figure out the performance of elderly just by digit forward task, we should consider the characteristic of Korean elderly which is that age is order, level of education is lower.
Second, sentence comprehension declines in normal aging. On the contrary to previous research about elderly’s language comprehension ability being mostly maintained, we identified that when age is older the performance is lower on the auditory comprehension task regarding level of sentence. Nevertheless, since the research of normal elderly subjects is limited, this study is meaningful in that among the tasks to assess language comprehension ability, the study aims to investigate auditory comprehension regarding the level of sentence and to identify decline in sentence comprehension with increased age.
Third, the variables to predict sentence comprehension include digit forward, digit backward and age of education. The fact that digit forward and backward tasks operate as predictors on sentence comprehension means that the ability to not only temporarily store information but to retain and operate information is needed in order to comprehend sentences. In addition, it supports previous research that relationship between education level effected language task and cognitive function is significant.
Fourth, the study found that working memory abilities and sentence comprehension is significantly correlated. Exercising working memory is important to maintain and enhance sentence comprehension not only for communication disorder due to neurological disease but also for normal elderly people.