Jana ReifegersteGeorgetown University | GU · Department of Neuroscience
Jana Reifegerste
PhD
About
36
Publications
50,559
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199
Citations
Introduction
My work focuses on the psychology of language and the (neuro-)cognitive correlates of first- and second-language acquisition and processing. Of particular interest to my research is the question of how, when, and why aging affects language processing, both in healthy participants as well as populations with neurodegenerative disorders.
Additional affiliations
November 2019 - present
Position
- Scientific Staff
Description
- As the PI on a project funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG), I investigate the lifespan development of morphological processing. Of particular interest is the role of various cognitive factors that may affect lexical and grammatical processing.
February 2019 - March 2019
January 2018 - present
Position
- PostDoc Position
Description
- I study the effects of age-related cognitive changes on language processing. I’m especially interested in memory and how the developmental trajectories for different memory systems may explain the lifespan development of different language abilities.
Education
October 2010 - September 2013
October 2008 - May 2010
October 2005 - August 2008
Publications
Publications (36)
Effects of aging on lexical processing are well attested, but the picture is less clear for grammatical processing. Where age differences emerge, these are usually ascribed to working-memory (WM) decline. Previous studies on the influence of WM on agreement computation have yielded inconclusive results, and work on aging and subject-verb agreement...
Speaking a late-acquired second language (L2) involves increased cognitive demands, as has been shown mainly in young and middle-aged adults. To investigate grammatical inflection in older L2 speakers, we acquired behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging data, while L1 and L2 speakers performed a grammaticality judgment task. L2 speaker...
Previous research with younger adults has revealed differences between native (L1) and non-native late-bilingual (L2) speakers with respect to how morphologically complex words are processed. This study examines whether these L1/L2 differences persist into old age. We tested masked-priming effects for derived and inflected word forms in older L1 an...
Objective: Parkinson’s disease (PD), which involves the degeneration of dopaminergic basal ganglia neurons, appears to affect language. We investigated which aspects of language are impaired in PD and what moderates these impairments. Our predictions were based on the declarative/procedural model of language, which links grammar, including in regul...
While much attention has been devoted to the cognition of aging multilingual individuals, little is known about how age affects their grammatical processing. We assessed subject-verb number-agreement processing in sixty native (L1) and sixty non-native (L2) speakers of German (age: 18-84) using a binary-choice sentence-completion task, along with v...
Processing action words (e.g., fork, throw) engages neurocognitive motor representations, consistent with embodied cognition principles. Despite age-related neurocognitive changes that could affect action words, and a rapidly aging population, the impact of healthy aging on action-word processing is poorly understood. Previous research suggests tha...
Despite increasing research on language in aging, age effects on morphological processing have received comparatively little attention. Some previous evidence suggests that while regular morphology (e.g., walk-walked) may remain relatively stable in older age, irregular morphology (e.g., bring-brought) shows signs of age-related decreases in proces...
During subject–verb agreement (SVA) computation, the conceptual or notional number of the subject can affect whether speakers choose a singular or a plural verb, potentially overriding the grammatical number of the subject’s head. The influence of notional number has hardly been investigated in bilinguals, however. Most previous research on bilingu...
Abstract: Visual-context cues have been found to influence comprehension of ambiguous sentences in young-adult populations. Research has suggested that older adults weight contextual information (e.g., world knowledge) more heavily than younger adults during language processing (Beese et al., 2019, Psychol Aging). Such age-dependent attention alloc...
Research on language processing in aging has increased over the past few decades. However, while some aspects of language (e.g., lexical and syntactic processing) have received a lot of attention, fewer studies have investigated morphological processing in older adults. The existing literature suggests particular changes (usually decreases) in proc...
Lexical-processing declines are a hallmark of aging. However, the extent of these declines may vary as a function of different factors. Motivated by findings from neurodegenerative diseases and healthy aging, we tested whether ‘motor-relatedness’ (the degree to which words are associated with particular human body movements) might moderate such dec...
Although declarative memory declines with age, sex and education might moderate these weaknesses. We investigated effects of sex and education on nonverbal declarative (recognition) memory in 704 older adults (aged 58–98, 0–17 years of education). Items were drawings of real and made-up objects. Age negatively impacted declarative memory, though th...
Substantial research has examined cognition in aging bilinguals. However, less work has investigated the effects of aging on language itself in bilingualism. In this article I comprehensively review prior research on this topic, and interpret the evidence in light of current theories of aging and theories of bilingualism. First, aging indeed appear...
Parkinson’s disease (PD), which involves basal ganglia degeneration, affects language as well as motor function. However, which aspects of language are impaired in PD and under what circumstances remain unclear. We examined whether lexical and grammatical aspects of language are differentially affected in PD, and whether this dissociation is modera...
Over the last century, the average human lifespan has doubled, rendering the effects of aging on cognition, including language, a vital research topic. Yet the study of the developmental trajectory of language processing has largely focused on comparing linguistic abilities between children and young adults, with less attention being paid to what h...
The medial-temporal-lobe-based declarative memory system is critical for everyday life. Evidence suggests that learning verbal information in declarative memory declines with age, but that sex and early-life education may moderate these weaknesses. However, the status of nonverbal declarative memory in aging remains unclear. We examined nonverbal m...
Parkinson’s disease (PD), which involves the degeneration of dopaminergic neurons in the basal ganglia, has long
been associated with motor deficits. Increasing evidence suggests that language can also be impaired, including
aspects of syntactic and lexical processing. However, the exact pattern of these impairments remains somewhat
unclear, for se...
Over the past century, global human life expectancy has more than doubled, increasing the importance of research on the effects of aging on cognition, including language processing. One of the clearest findings in this area of research appears to be an age-related decline in lexical abilities, as evidenced by increases in latencies and error rates...
The current study examined morphological priming in older individuals using two complex phenomena of German inflection. Study 1 examined inflected adjectives which encode multiple morphosyntactic features using regular affixes. Study 2 targeted inflected verb forms which also encode multiple features, but in this case using idiosyncratic stem varia...
Language processing in older adults has been the subject of much recent research. While previous research on language processing in bilingual older adults has focused on vocabulary and lexical access, very little is known about potential effects of aging on grammar in bilinguals. The current study investigates morphologically complex words in old-a...
Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of healthy aging on the ability to suppress
grammatically illicit antecedents during pronoun resolution.
Method: In 2 reading-based acceptability–judgment experiments, younger and older speakers of German read
sentences containing an object pronoun and 2 potential antecedent noun phr...
We comprehensively investigated language in Parkinson’s disease (PD), which is linked to dopaminergic neuronal degeneration in the basal ganglia, by testing multiple aspects of language within-subjects, and by examining factors that might negatively or positively impact language deficits. To expand the literature beyond English, we probed Farsi-spe...
Substantial research has examined the neural bases of morphology, and how morphological processing is affected in brain disorders. Parkinson’s disease (PD), in which frontal/basal-ganglia circuits undergo degeneration, may elucidate these issues. Ullman et al. (1997) reported that higher right-side hypokinesia, which reflects left frontal/basal-gan...
Unusual populations sometimes provide evidence for theoretically relevant contrasts that are more difficult to get from fit young native speakers. One case in point is derivational vs. inflectional morphology which in a number of masked priming studies (e.g., Jacob et al., in press; Kırkıcı & Clahsen, 2013; Veríssimo et al., 2016) yielded a dissoci...
According to dual-route models of morphological processing, regular inflected words can be retrieved as whole-word forms or decomposed into morphemes. Baayen, Dijkstra, and Schreuder (1997) proposed a dual-route model according to which plurals of singular-dominant words (e.g., "brides") are decomposed, while plurals of plural-dominant words (e.g.,...
Although Parkinson’s disease (PD), which involves basal-ganglia degeneration, is clearly associated with motor deficits, language has also been implicated. We comprehensively examined several aspects of language, within-subjects, in Farsi-speaking patients with moderate-to-severe PD. On the basis of previous findings and the declarative/procedural...
Language processing in older adults has been the subject of much recent research. Although aspects of language processing relying on memory, such as lexical access, show an age-related decline, there is evidence that grammatical processing abilities can be preserved. Notably, many studies reporting no specific effects of aging on grammatical proces...
Effects of aging on lexical processing are well attested. The picture is less clear for grammatical processing – findings range from equal performance (Tyler et al., 2010) to age-related difficulties with complex structures (Kemper, 1986). Where differences emerge, these are usually ascribed to working-memory (WM) decline (Kemper et al., 2004). Stu...
During both sentence comprehension and production, the presence of an ’intrusive’ licenser such as the plural-marked noun cabinets in (i) below often gives rise to false-positive acceptability judgements or ungrammatical production errors (Phillips et al., 2011). (i) The key to the cabinets was/*were rusty. To further test claims to the effect that...
According to dual-route models of morphological processing, regular morphologically complex words can either be retrieved from the mental lexicon as whole-word forms or decomposed into their constituent morphemes. Properties of words, such as frequency, affix type, and semantic transparency, can influence which of the two routes is used. Baayen, Di...
The populations of Western societies are becoming both increasingly older and more multilingual. While vocabulary and lexical skills of older bilinguals have attracted extensive research, little is known how the neural correlates of morphological processing in older bilinguals differ from native speakers and whether or not any differences are relat...
Language processing in older adults has been the subject of much recent research. Although aspects of language processing relying on memory and executive functions, such as episodic recall or naming, have been found to show an age-related decline, syntactic processing abilities can be preserved (e.g. Tyler et al., 2010). Previous research on langua...
According to dual-route models, regular morphologically complex forms can either be retrieved from the mental lexicon as units or decomposed into their constituent morphemes. In earlier work, we found evidence suggesting that young people decompose regular inflected forms, whereas older people tend to retrieve them as units. The goal of the presenc...
Models of the mental representation of morphologically complex words traditionally fall into one of two categories, Single-Route or Dual-Route models. The former further distinguish between Full-Listing (e.g. Butterworth, 1983) and Decomposition (e.g. Taft & Forster, 1976), while the latter assume different systems governing the access of mono- vs....
Questions
Question (1)
Hi all :)
I'm creating items for a language processing experiment, in which participants either see pictures and name the word (word production), or they see pictures and a word and indicate whether word is the correct label for the picture (word recognition). In the end, one question of many will be whether word production is easier or more difficult than word recognition (when the two conditions are matched on all sorts of factors) for the population under investigation.
Given the nature of our specific research question (which puts further constraints on the items), our set of potential word production items is much smaller than the set of potential word recognition items. I can think of at least three different options now:
1) Strictly adhere to item numbers for both conditions (e.g., word production = word recognition = 32 items)
2) Use as many items as possible for both categories (e.g., word production = 32, word recognition = 64), but make sure that the conditions are overall matched on item characteristics
3) Use as many items as possible for both categories (e.g., word production = 32, word recognition = 64), but make sure that there is a subset of (32) word-recognition items that is matched on item characteristics with the full set of (32) word recognition items, so we could analyze those separately if needed.
(Perhaps some combination of 2 or 3 would also be possible.)
I feel like option 1 would be the cleanest, but I also hate losing the potential power that might come from a larger item set. That said, I don't want it to be easier to find effects in one item set versus the other.
We're planning on using linear mixed-effects regression and will use covariates for all those item characteristics I mentioned up there, but I'm not sure whether that fully (or at all) takes care of the issue of different item numbers.
Thanks a lot for your help! :)
