Inhibitory Control Processes and Their Impact on Reading Comprehension and Speed in Older Adults: A Preliminary Analytical Cross-Sectional Study

Document Type : Original Articles

Author
Leila Ghasisin
Assistant Professor, Department of Speech Therapy, School of Rehabilitation Sciences, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran
10.48305/jrrs.2026.42602.1086
Abstract
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: A total of 70 participants, comprising 35 older adults and 35 younger adults, were recruited. To evaluate inhibitory processing, participants were presented with three variants of the translated Rainbow Passage: 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.
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.

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