在言语交际中，说话者经常使用含有隐含意义的话语，这要求听话者通过语用推理来对话语内容进行解读。随着个体年龄的增长，他们进行高效和准确的语用推理的能力可能会下降，导致沟通困难和误解。然而，这背后的神经机制尚未完全揭示。本文旨在全面采用脑电技术，从理解意义的角度探讨语用推理中的认知老化现象及其背后的神经机制。本研究调查了个体年龄和话语的语境关联程度对语用推理的影响。行为数据显示，年轻人在间接回答条件下的任务准确性显著高于老年人群体。此外，事件相关电位数据显示，对于老年组和年轻组来说，间接回答与直接回答相比都在答句呈现的晚期引起了N400波幅的增加。然而，对于年轻组来说，间接回答在答句呈现的早期和中期相比于直接回答同样引发了更大的N400效应，而老年组则没有。这些发现表明，与年轻人相比，老年人在语用推理能力上有所下降。这种下降可能源于老年人在实时动态地对正在展开的话语语义内容进行丰富时面临困难。
In verbal communication, a speaker often uses utterances with implicit meaning, which requires listeners to interpret via pragmatic inference. As individuals age, their ability to make efficient and accurate pragmatic inferences may decline, leading to communication difficulties and misunderstandings. Considering the fact that the cognitive neural mechanism has not yet been fully revealed, this paper aims to comprehensively employ EEG recording to probe into the cognitive aging phenomenon of pragmatic reasoning and the cognitive neural mechanisms behind it from the perspective of meaning understanding. The current research investigated the effect of age and the contextual relevance in utterances on pragmatic inference. The behavioral data showed that the task accuracy for the indirect reply conditions by the young group is significantly higher than that of the elderly group. Furthermore, the ERP data showed that, for both the elderly group and the young group, compared with the direct replies, indirect replies elicited an increased N400 in the late stages of reply presentation. For the young group, however, indirect replies triggered a greater N400 effect than direct answers in the early and middle stages of reply presentation, while the elderly group did not. These findings have demonstrated that elderly individuals exhibit a diminished capacity for pragmatic inference when compared to younger individuals. This decline may be attributed to the difficulty elderly individuals face in dynamically enriching the semantic content of ongoing speech in real-time.
