Effects of age, speed of processing, and working memory on comprehension of sentences with relative clauses.

Two hundred participants, 50 in each of four age ranges (19–29, 30–49, 50–69, 70–90) were tested for working memory, speed of processing, and the processing of sentences with relative clauses. In Experiment 1, participants read four sentence types (cleft subject, cleft object, subject-subject, subject-object) in a word-by-word, non-cumulative, self-paced reading task and made speeded plausibility judgments about them. In Experiment 2, participants read two types of sentences, one of which contained a doubly center embedded relative clause. Older participants' comprehension was less accurate and there was age-related slowing of online processing times in all but the simplest sentences, which increased in syntactically complex sentences in Experiment 1. This pattern suggests an age-related decrease in the efficiency of parsing and interpretation. Slower speed of processing and lower working memory were associated with longer online processing times only in Experiment 2, suggesting that task-related operations are related to general speed of processing and working memory. Lower working memory was not associated with longer reading times in more complex sentences, consistent with the view that general working memory is not critically involved in online syntactic processing. Longer online processing at the most demanding point in the most demanding sentence was associated with better comprehension, indicating that it reflects effective processing under some certain circumstances. However, the poorer comprehension performance of older individuals indicates that their slower online processing reflects inefficient processing even at these points. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age, working memory, and on-line syntactic processing in sentence comprehension.

One hundred twenty-seven individuals who ranged in age from18 to 90 years were tested on a reading span test and on measures of on-line and off-line sentence processing efficiency. Older participants had reduced working-memory spans compared with younger participants. The on-line measures were sensitive to local increases in processing load, and the off-line measures were sensitive to the syntactic complexity of the sentences. Older and younger participants showed similar effects of syntactic complexity on the on-line measures. There was some evidence that older participants were more affected than younger participants by syntactic complexity on the off-line measures. The results support the hypothesis that on-line processes involved in recognizing linguistic forms and determining the literal, preferred, discourse-coherent meaning of sentences constitute a domain of language processing that relies on its own processing resource or working-memory system. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Editorial.

This editorial addresses some of the current changes for Rehabilitation Psychology. No doubt you have already noticed one change (the new cover). Other, more substantive alterations will become apparent, some in this issue and others in the near future. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Determinants of perceived social support: Interpersonal transactions, personal outlook, and transient affective states.

During the last decade, the study of social support has relied heavily on recipients' reports of perceived support. However, such reports of support may reflect not only actual supportive interpersonal transactions but also the recipients' own personal and perceptual dispositions and comparatively transient mood states. This study examines these factors' independent effects on perceived support. Interpersonal transactions of social support were assessed in a longitudinal panel design using reports from 486 adult male respondents and their significant others (mostly wives). Using structural modeling techniques ({lisrel vi}), an unfolding series of statistical analyses were performed. The results provide strong support for a model in which recipients' perception of support is determined significantly and strongly by actual interpersonal transactions as reported by significant others, moderately by the recipients' negative outlook bias, and weakly by their anxiety and depression as indicators of their poor mental health. The implications of the results for future research are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Visualizing performance debugging

The authors examine a special software development environment called the Parallel Programming and Instrumentation Environment (PIE). PIE is designed to develop performance-efficient parallel and sequential computations. Following an explanation of PIE's general theory and features, PIE's visualization tools are used to isolate and repair the parallelism problem of an eight-process computation. Two more difficult examples using PIE are discussed. Some of the issues involved in correctly presenting visual information, such as the features users ask for and what can be done about a performance monitor's perturbation of computations, are addressed     

"Golden" Editorial.

This issue marks the beginning of the 50th volume of Rehabilitation Psychology (RP). This editorial reflects on the past 50 years of the journal's history. The editor also discusses the journal's future and notes that this is the last year RP will be published by the Educational Publishing Foundation, a subsidiary of the American Psychological Association. Starting next year, RP will be an APA publication. The editor looks forward to gaining a larger and wider audience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)