Process and strategy in memory for speech among younger and older adults

Younger and older adults listened to and immediately recalled short passages of speech that varied in the rate of presentation and in the degree of linguistic and prosodic curing. Although older adults showed a differential decrease in recall performance as a function of increasing speech rate, age differences in recall were reduced by the presence of linguistic and prosodic cues. Under conditions of optimum linguistic redundancy, older adults were also found to add more words and to make more meaning-producing reconstructions in recall. Differences in overall performance are accounted for in terms of age-related changes in working memory processing and strategy utilization.