The systematic use of semantic and acoustic processing by younger and older adults

To examine age differences in semantic and acoustic processing, 80 older and 80 younger adults participated in an incidental learning study. The study compared free recall and semantic and acoustic cued recall performance after five orienting conditions. The younger adults performed better than the older adults, especially after acoustic orienting. Encoding specificity effects occurred at both age levels. The results indicated that both age groups performed better with semantic processing than acoustic processing, but that older adults relied on the semantic information far more than the younger adults.