Presupposition processing declines with age

The present study investigates the processing of presuppositions across the life span and extends the fndings of the only available study on presupposition processing and typical aging by Domaneschi and Di Paola (J Pragmat 140:70–87, 2019). In an online and ofine task, we investigate the impact of cognitive load during the processing and recovery of two presupposition triggers—defnite descriptions and change-of-state verbs—comparing a group of younger adults with a group of older adults. The collected experimental data show that (1) presupposition recovery declines during normal aging, (2) presupposition recovery of change-of-state verbs is more cognitively demanding for older adults than the recovery of defnite descriptions, and lastly (3) presupposition recovery for the change-of-state verb begin is more demanding than the change-of-state verb stop. As of today, few works have directly investigated presupposition processing across the life span. To the best of our knowledge, this is the frst work revealing that cognitive load directly impacts the recovery of presuppositions across the life span, which in turn suggests an involvement of verbal working memo