AGING EFFECTS ON SELF-PACED READING PERFO RMANCE

The present study is concerned with hole young and elderly subjects re ad sentences which have to be immediately recalled. The task is a word -by-word self-paced reading task followed by a verbatim recall task. T he study aims to test the hypothesis that elderly subjects would show a selective slowing of encoding processes (i.e., slotting more on cert ain, parts of a sentence than on others) which would itself result fro m a reduction of working memory resources (Stine, 1990). The study. al so aims to test whether such a selective slowing might have an, adapta tive value in, the sense that it could allow the elderly subjects to h ave a recall performance similar to the young subjects' one. The data shout a clear selective slowing of the reading process in the elderly; in addition, this slotting seems to be partly determined bq the worki ng memory of the subjects. The data show also that despite the slow do wn, elderly subjects have poorer recall performance than younger subje cts. The pattern of reading times is further interpreted as indicating that the elderly subjects' specific problems arise from their trouble both in identifying the syntactic phrases and in opening new semantic structures.