Older adults' detection of misspellings during reading

Previous research has suggested that older adults' ability to detect a word as correctly or incorrectly spelled is intact, relative to younger adults. The purpose of the present experiment was to investigate the stability of misspelling detection processes across older adulthood when misspellings are presented in the context of reading.

Participants included 180 older adults represented equally from three decades: young-old adults in their 60s, middle-old adults in their 70s, and old-old adults in their 80s. They read sentences about health-related topics one word at a time and pressed a key to detect misspellings. A repeated measures analysis of variance was conducted on misspelling detection accuracy as well as response times for correctly detected misspellings.

There was a consistent age-related decline in misspelling detection, where middle-old and old-old adults were less accurate and slower than young-old adults in detecting misspellings.

Requiring misspelling detection during reading increases the working memory demands that are necessary for successful comprehension. In resource-demanding contexts, the top-down verification process of confirming a word's orthographic features becomes more difficult with increasing age.