The influence of prosodic structure on the interpretation of temporary syntactic ambiguity by young and elderly listeners.

The contribution of prosody to the interpretation of temporary syntactic ambiguity was examined for young and elderly listeners using a sentence-completion task. Temporary syntactic ambiguity refers to cases where it may be temporarily unclear whether a syntactic clause boundary has or has not been reached based on what has been heard in the sentence to that point. Results suggest that both young and elderly adults use a computationally less demanding late-closure parsing strategy whenever possible, but that sentence prosody can override this tendency when an alternative closure position is clearly signaled. Although subtle differences appeared in regard to sentence completion strategies and latencies to completion, results suggest that efficient resolution of syntactic boundary uncertainty and effective use of sentence prosody are two features of language comprehension that remain well-preserved in normal aging.