The salience of linguistic clauses in young and older adults' running memory for speech

An experiment is reported in which young and older adults were asked to recall as many words as possible that preceded the sudden interruption of a spoken passage. Both young and older adults' recall predominantly began at a major clause boundaries, with most responses reflecting recall of one or two full clauses. When placed under a heavier processing load induced by artificially accelerating the speech rate, an age dissociation appeared in the form of older adults producing a greater proportion of responses that were less than a full clause in length. With this qualification, however, recall of connected speech by the older adults remained largely organized by the clausal structure of what had been heard. This pattern reflects an organizing feature in language processing and memory that remains well-preserved in normal aging.