AGE-DIFFERENCES IN VERIDICAL AND RECONSTRUCTIVE RECALL OF SYNTACTICALLY AND RANDOMLY SEGMENTED SPEECH

Young and elderly adults listened to spoken passages that were segment ed for immediate recall either at natural syntactic boundaries (such a s after sentences or major clauses), or at random, nonsyntactic interv als. In addition, speech rate was manipulated using time-compression o f the speech materials. Results showed that random segmentation was es pecially detrimental to the elderly subjects' recall, as was the effec t of increasing speech rate. An analysis of subjects' recall errors of fered evidence for reconstruction in short-term segment recall in a ma nner similar to that usually associated with long-term memory.