Levels upon levels: predicting age differences in text recall

Younger and older adults read and recalled narrative and expository prose passages of varying propositional density. Age differences in recall were smaller when text units were from higher levels in a coherence graph and when the young and elderly groups compared were higher in verbal ability. The extent to which age differences were moderated by these factors varied, however, as a function of text characteristics. These results reinforce the position that the extent of age differences in text recall depends on both text and reader characteristics.