Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In the course of sentence processing, comprehenders must identify relationships between sentence elements in accor- dance with the sentence’s syntactic structure. However, low- level associative processes, which may yield interpretations in- compatible with global sentence context, have also been sug- gested to be at play in the early moments of processing. In two experiments, we examine the influence of low-level associa- tive cues alongside combinatorial information in sentences of varying complexity. Verb-driven predictions are used as means to explore the use of these information sources in the earliest moments of processing. In addition, we explore effects of lis- tener age on processing, given past claims that older adults’ predictions are more shallow. However, results showed similar patterns across age groups, although we did find clear ways in which associative cues overshadowed combinatorial computa- tions when these cues occurred very close to the verb.