The current investigation sought to determine whether normal, non-impaired young and older adults performed differentially on the active and passive sentences of the Computerized Revised Token Test Active/Passive (CRTT-A/P). Twenty-five young adults (18 to 30 years old) and twenty-five older adults (50 to 80 years old) completed this study.
The first purpose of this study was to determine if the two groups (i.e., young and older) differed significantly in their performance (as measured by overall mean scores) on the two sentence types (i.e., active and passive sentences) across each of the four subtests. Significant differences between subtests were found; participants obtained significantly higher scores on Subtest VIII than on Subtest V and Subtest VI.
The second purpose of this study was to determine if the two groups differed significantly in their efficiency scores on the two sentence types across each of the four subtests. It was found that (1) participants obtained significantly higher efficiency scores on Subtest VII than on Subtests V and VI and that (2) participants obtained significantly higher efficiency scores on Subtest VIII than on Subtest VI.
The final purpose of this study was to determine if the two groups differed significantly in their response times on the two sentence types across each of the four subtests. It was found that: (1) participants responded more quickly to the passive sentence type than to the active sentence type across all four subtests; (2) the older group responded more quickly on Subtest V than on Subtests VI and VIII; and (3) the older group responded more quickly on Subtest VII than on Subtests VI and VIII.
When differences between the two groups were examined for all of the measures, only one significant difference was found (the older group performed significantly slower than the young group on Subtests VI and VIII). These findings demonstrate that language comprehension abilities remain relatively constant with age. While the CRTT-A/P did not detect any significant comprehension differences between active and passive sentences in young and older individuals, this test has yet to be administered to various pathological groups (e.g., persons with agrammatic comprehension). This study thus provides preliminary data for future comparisons with pathological populations. Such studies are equally important for advancing our understanding of the way we comprehend language and form grammatical meaning.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-07282008-123004 |
| Date | 22 May 2009 |
| Creators | Yang, Dorothy |
| Contributors | Sheila R. Pratt, Donald A. Robin, Patrick J. Doyle, Michael W. Dickey, Malcolm R. McNeil |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-07282008-123004/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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