Older people have more difficulty than the young in tasks involving complex linguistic processes such as reasoning from new information in memory. Recent evidence suggests that older people have greater limitation in working memory capacity than younger adults. Ability to process information in working memory appears to be critical to language comprehension, so a capacity limitation with advancing age might impair language comprehension and therefore reading comprehension in the elderly. The purpose of this proposal is to a) explore the possibility that older adults have difficulties in reading comprehension online, that is, while they are reading, specifically in understanding relationships between concepts in co-referential sentences; and b) whether these difficulties are related to capacity limitations in working memory. The specific questions addressed are: (1) do older people need relatively more time to read related sentences and to comprehend them as such? (2) what underlying processes in comprehending related sentences present problems for older adults? (3) how are these processes affected by overloading working memory in older adults? The answers to these questions will provide practical information about how to design materials targeted for older readers as well as a theoretical perspective on language comprehension in the elderly.
