Text recall in adulthood: The roles of text imagery and orienting tasks

Abstract

Three experiments were conducted to investigate dual-code theory and the levels-of-processing approach in discourse processing. Three concrete and three abstract tests were constructed to be equivalent in the degree to which they were perceived as concrete vs. abstract. All experiments presented concrete and abstract texts under three orienting tasks. Results of the first experiment showed main effects for both text concreteness and orienting tasks and an interaction that can be described by the lack of a difference between the recall rates for the concrete and the abstract texts under the intentional-learning condition. In the second experiment, longer texts were used and a second trial was introduced. The interaction was not replicated. There were main effects for concreteness, orienting tasks, and trials. The third experiment replicated Experiment 2 with subjects in their late 40s and over 70. Main effects were obtained as before. Age interacted with both orienting task and concreteness, indicating that older adults gain less than middle-aged adults from intentional-learning instructions and benefit less from highly concrete texts. The discussion focuses on the relation of Materials and Subjects as factors to dual-code theory and levels of processing approach.

Discourse Behaviors in Older Adults

“…Cohen & Faulkner, 1981) around the same time has resulted in a proliferation of studies of narrative text or discourse comprehension in recent years. In general, discourse production of older adults appears to be affected by four sets of variables (von Eye, Dixon, & Krampen, 1989): (1) subject characteristics (skills and specific impairments, prior knowledge of context or topic); 2task demands (free recall, cueing, immediate versus delayed recall, recognition, summary, or thematic identification); (3) text material design (organization of material, type of discourse text, propositional density, cohesive and propositional ties, modality of presentation, associated imagery, lexical and syntactic complexity, rate and prosodic manipulations of material); and (4) orienting components (instructions to subject, attentional challenges, recommended cueing or learning strategies). As with other life span studies of linguistic comprehension, discourse comprehension appears to show consistent, agerelated decrements when complexity is increased, text cohesion/redundancy are reduced, normal prosodic cues are altered, competing tasks are presented, and information density is expanded.…”