Changes in the constraints of semantic and syntactic congruity on memory across three age groups

20 college undergraduates, 25 sixth-grade, and 31 second-grade students studied targets embedded in three types of sentence contexts and then performed free recall and cued recall tests. Although there were no differences in performance of free recall among sentence types within each age group, the differences in cued recall among sentence types were observed. For sixth graders and undergraduates, both semantically congruous/syntactically congruous sentences and semantically incongruous/syntactically congruous sentences led to a better cued recall of targets than semantically incongruous/syntactically incongruous sentences. Second graders performed better in a cued recall of targets in semantically congruous/syntactically congruous sentences than for the other two sentence types. The results were interpreted as indicating changes across age groups in constraints of semantic and syntactic congruity on the spreading activation of targets in memory.