Abstract

This study examines the effects of age, working memory and syntactic complexity on sentence processing. For this purpose we compare the performance of younger and older adults in a self-administered reading task of sentences with subject and object nested relatives clauses. A mixed effects analysis was carried for reading times, accuracy and response times, which took into account that observations were repeated inside individuals and the correct probability distribution of the observed variables. The results show effects of age in processing, but they do not support the hypothesis of syntactic processing decline as an effect of less working memory capacity in older adults. In addition, the data analysis confirms the complexity of object relatives processing compared to subject relatives processing in Spanish.