The influence of foreign language and a word-color unitization strategy on the age-related associative deficit

Older adults typically show a disproportionate decline in associative, relative to item, memory. Here, we investigated the role of stimulus presentation in a foreign language, as well as the impact of a unitization instruction for binding word-color pairs into a single unit, in this effect.

Italian younger (n = 34) and healthy older (n = 17) adults completed a word-color associative recognition memory task in their native language and in German (foreign language) under two inten¬tional encoding conditions: Without strategy instruction and with an instruction to generate a mental image of the object in the associated color (unitization strategy).

The group of older adults, which overall reported high levels on cog¬nitive reserve (CR) proxies, showed no evidence of a relative associative deficit in their native language without strategy instruction. However, in the foreign language and with the unitization strategy instruction, an age-related associative deficit in older adults emerged. Hence, the older adults may have been able to compensate for associative binding challenges when task demands were rela¬tively low, but not when demands increased. When no strategy was instructed, there was a tendency for a stronger relative associative memory deficit in older, compared to young adults in the foreign language. However, this pattern disap¬peared in a comparison where young adults were matched to older adults in foreign language proficiency, and hence there was little evidence for a modu¬lation of the relative age-related associative memory deficit in older adults by language. A higher increase in associative memory performance was, then, found from the object-color unitization strategy for young than for older adults, effec¬tively increasing the age-related associative memory deficit. Across age groups, memory performance increased more by strategy use in the native than in the foreign language.

Together, these results improve our understanding of the con¬tribution of foreign language and unitization strategy instructions, to age-related associative memory decline.