Social context effects on story recall in older and younger women: does the listener make a difference?

The story-recall performance of older and younger women was examined within an oral story-retelling context with two listener conditions. Forty-eight older women (M age = 67.81 years; SD = 2.62) and 47 younger women (M age = 20.47 years; SD = 1.53) were asked to learn one of two stories with the goal to retell the story from memory either to an experimenter or to a young child. Did the listener make a difference in story recall? Yes. Although age-group differences in propositional recall favoring the younger women occurred when an experimenter was the listener, there were no age-group differences when a child was the listener. In addition, when a child was listening, both older and younger tellers adapted their narratives by producing more elaborations and repetitions, as well as by simplifying the more complex of the two stories. Across stories, however, the older tellers adjusted the complexity of their retellings to the age of their listeners more than did the younger tellers. Results highlight the importance of considering the social context of remembering in memory-aging research.