View article

This study investigated age group differences in adults' running memory span for prose. College students and adults 60 to 94 years of age listened to a prose passage that was interrupted occasionally by pauses. At each pause, the adults attempted to recall the immediately preceding text. The pauses followed either two single-clause sentences, a two-clause right-branching sentence, or a two-clause left-branching sentence. There was a significant age group x syntactic form x Clause Order interaction such that the age group differences in verbatim recall were exacerbated by the effects of syntactic complexity. The elderly recalled 25% fewer words from the first embedded clause of the leftbranching sentences than the college students, whereas they recalled only 4% fewer words from the first of two successive single-clause sentences. Performance on the running memory span task was also correlated with two …