Language is a crucial and complex lifelong capacity that is constrained by cognitive aging. Aging is thus regarded to be associated with poor performance particularly in the receptive and expressive language abilities. There are, however, some recent proposals that normal aging impairs specific aspects of language production, while most comprehension abilities remain stable as we age. This paper investigates how cognitive aging affects language performance, focusing on syntactic and semantic processing. Based on the experiments of structure choice and modification, it finds that both the syntactic and semantic systems remain largely stable across the life span and the semantic processing is rather preserved longer with age than the syntactic processing. This finding is consistent with the recent research on the compensatory neural recruitment as we age.

• 박순혁(부경대학교)