Communication Sciences and Disorders Commons^™

Context Effects On Ambiguous Idiom Comprehension In Older And Younger Adults, Amy De Silva

Honors College

The focus of the current study was on idiom comprehension in younger and older adults. Due to inconsistent results in previous studies, it is unclear whether older adults may have problems understanding idioms. For the current study, I used a sentence-to-word matching task presented on an iPad with software that recorded participants’ response time and accuracy. Participants also completed a familiarity task where they rated idioms on how frequently these phrases were encountered. I predicted that older adults would have more difficulty comprehending idioms because of the context in which the idioms were embedded and the timed nature of the …