Language comprehension across the life span: Introduction to the special section.

How do typical experimental tasks (e.g., button-press tasks under time pressure, tasks with high working memory load) affect, and maybe even bias, the outcome of cognitive experiments comparing younger and older subjects? Over the last years, cognitive aging has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, partly due to the global demographic trend toward aging populations and the economic, medical, and social challenges this poses. However, the author cautions against overly simplistic expectations by highlighting that in SiN processing, age-cognition relationships interact in complex ways with further variables such as the listening situation and the use of hearing aids. These structural and functional brain changes have widely been taken to underlie a general deterioration of cognitive functions including episodic and working memory, executive control, and language processing ([3]; see [4], for a review). [Extracted from the article]