Chapter 8 Aging, Self-Regulation, and Learning from Text

There is general agreement that language comprehension depends on both automatic, modular, interpretive processes (often modeled as a spread of activation or a resonance-based activation), and more resource-consuming, integrative, post-interpretive processes that are used to resolve meaning. Considerable effort has been devoted to understanding how readers and listeners do resolve meaning, often under the assumption that there is a single veridical meaning to be represented. Recently, there has been a greater focus on how the self-regulation of attention may give rise to different representations. Because aging is often associated with change in competencies and motivation that can affect such regulation, adult development can provide an interesting window into these processes.