Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- 1 Theories of information processing and theories of aging
- 2 Effects of aging on verbal abilities: Examination of the psychometric literature
- 3 Aging and individual differences in memory for written discourse
- 4 Geriatric psycholinguistics: Syntactic limitations of oral and written language
- 5 Aging and memory activation: The priming of semantic and episodic memories
- 6 Automatic and effortful semantic processes in old age: Experimental and naturalistic approaches
- 7 Integrating information from discourse: Do older adults show deficits?
- 8 Comprehension of pragmatic implications in young and older adults
- 9 Capacity theory and the processing of inferences
- 10 Age differences in memory for texts: Production deficiency or processing limitations?
- 11 Episodic memory and knowledge interactions across adulthood
- 12 The disorder of naming in Alzheimer's disease
- 13 Language and memory processing in senile dementia Alzheimer's type
- 14 Patterns of language and memory in old age
- Author index
- Subject index
10 - Age differences in memory for texts: Production deficiency or processing limitations?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- 1 Theories of information processing and theories of aging
- 2 Effects of aging on verbal abilities: Examination of the psychometric literature
- 3 Aging and individual differences in memory for written discourse
- 4 Geriatric psycholinguistics: Syntactic limitations of oral and written language
- 5 Aging and memory activation: The priming of semantic and episodic memories
- 6 Automatic and effortful semantic processes in old age: Experimental and naturalistic approaches
- 7 Integrating information from discourse: Do older adults show deficits?
- 8 Comprehension of pragmatic implications in young and older adults
- 9 Capacity theory and the processing of inferences
- 10 Age differences in memory for texts: Production deficiency or processing limitations?
- 11 Episodic memory and knowledge interactions across adulthood
- 12 The disorder of naming in Alzheimer's disease
- 13 Language and memory processing in senile dementia Alzheimer's type
- 14 Patterns of language and memory in old age
- Author index
- Subject index
Summary
Studies of the effects of aging on memory for written and spoken texts have now accumulated to the point where a complex pattern of convergent and divergent results is apparent. Recent reviews have sought to make sense of this pattern and to identify the sources of the many discrepancies between different studies by analyzing the interactive relationships between attributes of the text, the learner, and the task (Hultsch & Dixon, 1984; Meyer & Rice, in press). The outcome of these reviews is that we are much better able to identify the circumstances in which old people are likely to remember texts less well than young people. We can identify the type of texts, the kind of people, and the kind of memory tasks that will, in combination, be most likely to exhibit an age-related deficit.
But why does ability to remember information from texts decline in old age? Researchers are currently focused on finding a theoretical explanation that can illuminate the underlying causes of age-related changes. The explanations that are commonly put forward can be divided into two classes, those that attribute the deficits to faulty strategies (the production deficiency explanation) and those that attribute them to processing limitations (the processing capacity explanation). This chapter attempts to assess the power and scope of these explanations using two criteria: how far the theory generates predictions that are precise and unambiguous, and how far the empirical evidence conforms to the predictions.
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- Information
- Language, Memory, and Aging , pp. 171 - 190Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1988
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