Effects of Healthy Aging and Gender on the Electrophysiological Correlates of Semantic Sentence Comprehension: The Development of Dutch Normative Data

Abstract

Purpose:The clinical use of event-related potentials in patients with language disorders is increasingly acknowledged. For this purpose, normative data should be available. Within this context, healthy aging and gender effects on the electrophysiological correlates of semantic sentence comprehension were investigated.Method:One hundred and ten healthy subjects (55 men and 55 women), divided among three age groups (young, middle aged, and elderly), performed a semantic sentence congruity task in the visual modality during electroencephalographic recording.Results:The early visual complex was affected by increasing age as shown by smaller P2 amplitudes in the elderly compared to the young. Moreover, the N400 effect in the elderly was smaller than in the young and was delayed compared to latency measures in both middle-aged and young subjects. The topography of age-related amplitude changes of the N400 effect appeared to be gender specific. The late positive complex effect was increased at frontal electrode sites from middle age on, but this was not statistically significant. No gender effects were detected regarding the early P1, N1, and P2, or the late positive complex effect.Conclusion:Especially aging effects were found during semantic sentence comprehension, and this from the level of perceptual processing on. Normative data are now available for clinical use.