Situated Language Processing Across the Lifespan: A Review

Abstract

In this review we focus on the close interplay between visual contextual information and real-time language processing. Crucially, we are showing that not only college-aged adults but also children and older adults can profit from visual contextual information for language comprehension. Yet, given age-related biological and experiential changes, children and older adults might not always be able to link visual and linguistic information in the same way and with the same time course as younger adults in real-time language processing. Psycholinguistic research on visually situated real-time language processing in children and even more so older adults is still scarce compared to research in this domain using college-aged participants. In order to gain more comprehensive insights into the interplay between vision and language during real-time processing, we are arguing for a lifespan approach to situated language processing.