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<p>Cognitive aging involves both progressive decline and dynamic adaptive reorganization in lexical processing. While older adults benefit from early language experience and accumulated lexical knowledge, the metacognitive mechanisms supporting this adaptation remained unclear. Through a lexical decision task and an eye-tracked sentence reading task, we examined how metacognitive monitoring and control operate in lexical processing between the two age groups. Following the theoretical framework of metacognition, early eye-movement indices were treated as markers of online monitoring, whereas later and global measures indexed strategic control. Compared to young adults (18–26 years), older adults (64–74 years) showed reduced overall processing efficiency but heightened sensitivity to the age of acquisition, indicating robust monitoring of processing difficulty for late-acquired words. In sentence reading, older adults strategically leveraged contextual predictability, demonstrating reduced total fixation duration and regressions under high-predictability conditions. In contrast, young adults demonstrated a selective reliance on context for more demanding lexical items. These findings suggest that aging is characterized not only by decline but also by adaptive metacognitive regulation, whereby older adults flexibly recruit experiential knowledge and contextual cues to compensate for their processing constraints.</p>

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Metacognitive regulation of lexical processing in older adults: age of acquisition effects and the compensatory role of word predictability

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年5月30日

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  • Bin Xuan,
  • Lina Zhang,
  • Zining Wang,
  • Xinyu Fang

摘要

Cognitive aging involves both progressive decline and dynamic adaptive reorganization in lexical processing. While older adults benefit from early language experience and accumulated lexical knowledge, the metacognitive mechanisms supporting this adaptation remained unclear. Through a lexical decision task and an eye-tracked sentence reading task, we examined how metacognitive monitoring and control operate in lexical processing between the two age groups. Following the theoretical framework of metacognition, early eye-movement indices were treated as markers of online monitoring, whereas later and global measures indexed strategic control. Compared to young adults (18–26 years), older adults (64–74 years) showed reduced overall processing efficiency but heightened sensitivity to the age of acquisition, indicating robust monitoring of processing difficulty for late-acquired words. In sentence reading, older adults strategically leveraged contextual predictability, demonstrating reduced total fixation duration and regressions under high-predictability conditions. In contrast, young adults demonstrated a selective reliance on context for more demanding lexical items. These findings suggest that aging is characterized not only by decline but also by adaptive metacognitive regulation, whereby older adults flexibly recruit experiential knowledge and contextual cues to compensate for their processing constraints.