An Analysis of Korean Learners’ Language Processing Ability in English Inversion Structures about Age-Related Change

This study aims to identify the aspects of language function affected by age-related changes in the language information processing process, which can cause delays or impairments. The experimental sentences were classified into three language systems: phonetic, semantic, and syntactic areas. This research investigated how age-related changes affect language processing in each area. The results showed significant probabilities for the hypothesis in both the significant words and the whole sentence of the pre- positional inversion sentence 2, with 0.045 and 0.049, respectively. In the seman- tic area, the significant probability of the whole sentence was 0.003 with 99% confidence. In the syntactic area, the significant probability of “laughed” in Gar- den Path sentence 1 was 0.040. These findings confirm that age-related changes significantly impact language processing in all sectors of the language system.