LAUSR

Abstract This work takes a first step towards a psycholinguistic investigation on the role of aging in processing presuppositions. Experimental data collected support two main results. First, in online language comprehension older adults exhibit higher processing costs when presuppositions involve demanding mental representations. Second, the ability to recover information introduced in the discourse as taken for granted is affected by the age factor. Overall, beyond other more explored levels of pragmatic processing, the decline with age of processing speed and working memory ability seems to affect presuppositions processing.