A Study Of Predictive Inferential Revision During Chinese N Arrative Text Reading Among Young And Older Adults

Reading comprehension is a cognitive-demanding activity,which involves comprehension monitoring and inferencing.During the predictive inferential revision process,people go through the monitoring phase to revise the initial inference and produce the newly revised inference consistent with the context.As working memory capacity and inhibitory control ability seem to affect older adults’ performance on inference processing,and in the field of Chinese narrative text reading,little is known about older adults’ inferential revision abilities,the main purpose of this study is to examine the age-related differences between young and older adults’ predictive inferential revision and investigate the effects of working memory capacity and inhibitory control ability on predictive inferential revision processing among young and older adults.The present study enrolled thirty young adults and thirty-two normally aging adults from Beijing city and Hebei Province,with matched education levels.The digit span task,the flanker task and the lexical decision task were employed to measure working memory capacity,inhibitory control ability and inferential revision ability respectively.Independent-samples and paired-samples t tests,ANOVA as well as correlation analysis were performed.Results revealed that the young group demonstrated significant priming effects for inferential revision target word at an 850-ms ISI,while the older group did not,suggesting the cognitive aging in inferential revision processing.Additionally,the older group demonstrated a significant relationship between RT differences of response to inferential revision target words in the revise and control conditions and working memory capacity as well as inhibitory control abilities.However,there was no significant relationship between these factors in the young group.This indicated that working memory capacity and inhibitory control abilities influenced the cognitive aging phenomenon in the inferential revision processing,to a certain extent.The present study investigated the cognitive aging phenomenon of predictive inferential revision processing during Chinese narrative text reading with the behavioral research method.The empirical findings,to a certain extent,enrich the research on inferential revision processing during reading,provide valuable insight for future cognitive aging research on inferential revision processing during Chinese text comprehension,and offer a possible heading direction for the future research on language aging and training.