Prose Recall: Effects of Aging, Verbal Ability, and Reading Behavior

Abstract

This paper describes an exploratory multivariate analysis designed to determine the relative contributions of age, verbal ability, education, reading habits, and recall strategies to the explanation of variation in performance on prose recall tasks among adults. Four hundred twenty-two adults in three age groups--young (18 to 32), middle (40 to 54) and old (62 to 80)--read and recalled in writing two 388-word prose passages and answered questions about their background, reading habits, and recall strategies. Results indicate that a decrease in quantity of recall appears with increasing age, though verbal ability is a better predictor of recall than is age. In addition, a recall strategy factor representing a paragraph-by-paragraph retrieval strategy produces the highest simple correlations with total recall and contributes significantly to the other recall measures.

Memory for a dialectical and a nondialectical prose passage in young and older adults

“…There were no age differences in the number of propositions recalled at any level in either passage, supporting a growing body of literature that finds neither age differences (Cavanaugh, 1984;Mandel & Johnson, 1984) nor Age x Propositional Level interactions (Rice & Meyer, 1986;Surber et al, 1984;Tun, 1989) in the amount of recall.…”

“…Some studies have failed to find age differences at any propositional level (e.g., Cavanaugh, 1984;Mandel & Johnson, 1984); some have found poorer performance at all levels (Stine & Wingfield, 1987;Surber, Kowalski, & Pena-Paez, 1984;Tun, 1989); and still others have found poorer memory for gist with memory for details intact (Cohen, 1979;Gordon & Clark, 1974). Attempts to reconcile these disparate findings have focused on such characteristics as verbal ability (Adams, 1991;Cavanaugh, 1983;Meyer & Rice, 1981;Rice & Meyer, 1986;Stine & Wingfield, 1987;Taub, 1979;Zacks, Hasher, Doren, Hamm, & Attig, 1987), motivation (Dixon & Hultsch, 1983), study methods (Ratner, Schell, Crimmins, Mittelman, & Baldinelli, 1987), personal meaningfulness (Adams, 1991), passage characteristics (Kemper, i987;Stine & Wingfield, 1987;Tun, 1989), and instructional set (Byrd, 1985;Simon et al, 1982).…”

Comprehension of Written Health Care Information in an Affluent Geriatric Retirement Community: Use of the Test of Functional Health Literacy

“…Madden [14] demonstrated linear slowing with increasing age of the reaction time required by subjects ranging from 20 to 78 years old to recognize a string of letters as a word or nonword. Rice and Meyer [15] demonstrated an age-related decrease in recall of the content of a passage read by subjects aged 62-80 years versus younger adults, although factors limiting the difference included vocabulary strength, education, enjoyment of reading and use of reading to acquire needed information. Difficulty with abstraction of visual stimuli in older subjects has been suggested to stem from attention deficits limiting stimuli encoding into working memory [16] and difficulty retaining encoded information in working memory while simultaneously processing the information [17].…”

The language production system and senile dementia of Alzheimer's type: Neuropathological implications

“…It seems that language comprehension per se may not be the locus of age-related deficiency in discourse processing for retention and recall. The variables of sensitivity to prose, working memory, level of verbal ability, and education are also involved in age-related performance in discourse processing (Meyer and Rice 1983, Rice and Meyer 1986, Hultsch and Dixon 1984Spilich 1985, etc. Hultsch and Dixon's (1984 analysis of the relevant research studies suggests that 'age differences appear to be attenuated when the text is well organized, when there is prior knowledge about the topic, and when the subjects possess superior levels of semantic abilities'.…”