The present studies examined adult age differences in prose comprehension. Young and older adults from low-and high-education populations heard narrative passages at different presentation rates and difficulty levels. Immediately after listening to a tape-recorded version of each story, subjects orally recalled it. The results consistently demonstrated that younger adults remembered more than older adults, but subjects from all groups favored the main ideas in their recalls. Also, subjects from all ages and educational levels were equally able to identify the important information in the stories. It was suggested that sensitivity to the semantic structure of prose is not a major component of adult age differences in discourse comprehension. Furthermore, it was suggested that adult age differences observed on discourse comprehension tasks may reflect an age-related decline in processing capacity.Several studies have recently examined adult age differences in memory for prose materials
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