Older adults have more difficulty than younger ones in some aspects of language comprehension, such as reasoning from information in memory, determining whether there are anomalies in texts, and ability to follow syntactically complex directions. They also differ from younger people in other kinds of language processing, such as comprehension of relationships between terms that reference each other when the topic of the coreferring terms is no longer in working memory. It has been assumed that findings such as these are related to reductions in working memory capacity with age, and this may contribute to difficulties in comprehending the more subtle and complex aspects of language. This proposal is aimed at extending understanding of the processes underlying reading comprehension in older adults in several ways. In one experiment, individual differences in working memory capacity will be examined to determine whether they can independently predict age differences in comprehension under varying conditions of working memory involvement. In others, the relationship between online reading comprehension and later memory for texts will be examined to verify whether studies arguing for comprehension deficits based on memory performance are valid. In another experiment, whether older adults recognize when they have not comprehended texts because of working memory capacity deficits will be studied. Finally, other processes in comprehension such as selective retention of information in working memory and inference during reading will be evaluated. These findings will provide theoretically useful data about language comprehension in older adults as well as practical information about how to design materials targeted for older readers.
