It is now well established that the elderly often have difficulty in standard laboratory memory tasks and that these deficits are, at least, in part due to differences in the quality and degree of initial encoding. The extent to which these deficits generalize to include memory for naturalistic written text is not clear, however. Such questions are important in light of the role that such cognitive deficits may play in the mental health of the elderly adult. Little research has been done to investigate the strategies used by the elderly adult in comprehending, or encoding, text. This is partly due to the fact that methods for studying the online encoding of text have only been developed in recent years. The proposed research is designed to develop and extend these new methodologies to the study of text processing among the elderly. Specifically, these methods involve the accurate measurement of reading time (RT) at the level of the word and at the level of the sentence as a function of different text attributes. Text attributes considered may include those at the level of the word (e.g., frequency, length), the sentence (e.g., length in words, number or propositions contained), or at a broader text level (e.g., familiarity, narrativity). Multiple regression, in which RT is the dependent variable predicted by these text attributes, may than be used to examine the differential effects of text features in controlling processing time. Such a methodology applied to the study of text processing in later adulthood would enable the investigation of the hypothesis that the older adult distributes processing time differently in the comprehension of text.
| Stine, E A; Wingfield, A; Myers, S D (1990) Age differences in processing information from television news: the effects of bisensory augmentation. J Gerontol 45:P1-8 |
| Stine, E A (1990) On-line processing of written text by younger and older adults. Psychol Aging 5:68-78 |
