فهرست نشریات علمی دسترسی آزاد ایران

Introduction: Grounded in Inhibition Theory, many age-related cognitive challenges ‒ including text comprehension errors ‒ are attributed to the deficient inhibition of irrelevant information. While this deficit is known to be more pronounced in older adults, few studies have exclusively compared reading comprehension and speed between younger and older populations under identical inhibitory conditions. This study aimed to investigate the impact of semantic interference on reading performance across these two age groups. Materials and Methods: In this non-interventional analytical cross-sectional study, a total of 70 participants comprising 35 older adults (17 women and 18 men, with a mean age of 63.11 ± 3.63 years) and 35 younger adults (19 women and 16 men, with a mean age of 31.08 ± 6.31 years) were selected using a non-random convenience sampling method and participated in the research. To evaluate inhibitory processing, participants were presented with a translated version of Rainbow Passage along with two types of interfering words in three assessment situations: a control condition, a condition containing semantically related distractors, and a condition with semantically unrelated distractors. Reading speed (words per second) and text comprehension were assessed across these three assessment conditions. To compare reading speed and comprehension, the two-way multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) test was used at a significance level of 0.05. Results: Multivariate analysis revealed significant differences in reading speed and comprehension between the two groups, with younger adults consistently outperforming the elderly. In the older adult group, the lowest mean reading speeds were associated with texts containing semantically related distractors, whereas the lowest comprehension scores were observed in the presence of unrelated distractors. Conclusion: Findings suggest that aging is associated with a significant decline in inhibitory control. Specifically, semantically unrelated distractors appear to deteriorate reading comprehension, while related distractors primarily impede reading speed in older adults. These results highlight how the semantic nature of interfering information selectively impacts different dimensions of linguistic processing in the aging brain.