G. Brebion et al., WORKING-MEMORY IN OLDER SUBJECTS - DEALING WITH ONGOING AND STORED INFORMATION IN LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION, Psychological research, 58(3), 1995, pp. 225-232
The purpose of this experiment was to investigate the role of aging in
working memory (WM), or at least the part involved in language compre
hension, e.g., a double function of processing the ongoing information
and keeping in memory the product of this processing. Young and older
subjects were asked to simultaneously detect incongruities ill senten
ces and keep increasing longer series of words(3, 4, or 5) in memory.
The difficulty of incongruity detection was manipulated by variation o
f the number of intervening words (0, 6, or 12) between two critical w
ords. Incongruity detection was assumed to be linked to the processing
of information function of working memory. The concurrent mnemonic lo
ad consisted of material previously processed, and was assumed to be l
inked to the storage function of WM. Results showed that an increment
in incongruity-detection difficulty led to a greater decrement in accu
racy in older than in young subjects, indicating an impairment in the
information-processing function. On the other hand. an increment in co
ncurrent mnemonic load led to a slightly smaller decrement in accuracy
in older subjects. Furthermore, fewer words from this mnemonic load w
ere recalled in older subjects. It is suggested that older subjects ar
e impaired in coping with both requirements of the task, and tend to s
acrifice the storage of information recently processed to devote their
resources to the immediate processing component of the task. These re
sults are discussed in relation to their implications for language com
prehension.