Existing knowledge of linguistic structure mitigates associative memory deficits in older adults

Background/Study Context: Older adults show lower memory performance than younger adults when a task requires them to create associations (Naveh-Benjamin, 2000, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26, 1170-1187). In this study, associative memory was examined in order to assess whether age differences in performance were mitigated when the word pairs to be learned utilized a familiar pattern seen in everyday language (adjective-noun), which we propose as a type of schematic support that capitalizes upon linguistic structure.

Thirty older (66-87 years old) and younger (18-22 years old) adults from the University of Missouri and the surrounding community studied word pairs in noun-noun, adjective-noun, and noun-adjective sequences. A mixed-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to analyze differences in memory sensitivity (d') and response bias (C) from separate item and associative recognition memory tests between age groups and between word pair sequences.

As expected, older participants did show lower associative memory for noun-noun and noun-adjective pairs than younger adults, a hallmark of an age-related associative binding deficit, but there were no age differences in associative memory for adjective-noun pairs. The latter supports our hypothesis that seeing word pairs in a familiar adjective-noun linguistic sequence can provide support in older adults' associative processing to mitigate difficulties experienced when binding together word pairs.

The results obtained show that older adults can use prior existing knowledge to attenuate their cognitive shortcomings, specifically linguistic structural knowledge, to mitigate their associative binding deficit. Further research is necessary to determine the exact mechanism of improvement mediated by this form of schematic support, namely, whether it results in more effective recruitment of strategic processes such as unitization.