MULTIPLE MEMORY-SYSTEMS IN THE PROCESSING OF SPEECH - EVIDENCE FROM AGING

Young and old adults gave verbatim recall of recorded prose passages t hat varied in average word predictability and rate of presentation. Su bjects were allowed to interrupt the speech passages at points of thei r choosing for recall of what they had heard on a segment-by-segment b asis. For both age groups, the sizes of the segments selected were aff ected by level of predictability but not by the speech rate of the spo ken passages. Subjects tended to interrupt the passages for recall at linguistic constituent boundaries. Recall of the segments was poorer f or the elderly adults than for the young adults, with larger age diffe rences for faster speech rates and for passages that were lower in ave rage word predictability, Results are discussed in terms of the recent suggestion that multiple memory representations of a speech message m ay co-occur briefly in time.