EFFECTS OF AGE ON SERIAL-RECALL OF NATURAL AND SYNTHETIC SPEECH

The present study addressed the effects of aging on auditory serial-re call performance for natural and synthetic words. Word difficulty, mea sured in terms of frequency of occurrence and phonological similarity, and rate of presentation were also manipulated in an effort to determ ine which processes underlying serial-recall performance, if any, were affected by aging. Results indicated that age per se had little effec t on short-term (working) memory as measured by the serial recall of m onosyllabic words. Rate of presentation had little effect on recall fo r either subject group. Word difficulty, on the other hand, affected r ecall for both groups, with easy words being more readily recalled tha n hard words.