Resource allocation during spoken discourse processing: Effects of age andpassage difficulty as revealed by self-paced listening

The allocation of processing resources during spoken discourse comprehensio n was studied in a manner analogous to self-paced reading using the auditor y moving window technique (Ferreira, Henderson, Anes, Weeks, & McFarlane, 1 996). Young and of der participants listened to spoken passages in a self-p aced segment-by-segment fashion. In Experiment 1, we examined the influence of speech rate and passage complexity on discourse encoding and recall per formance. In Experiment 2, we examined the influence of speech rate and pre sentation mode (self-paced vs. full-passage presentation) on recall perform ance. Results suggest that diminished memory performance in the older adult group relative to the young adult group is attributable to age-related dif ferences in how resources were allocated during the initial encoding of the spoken discourse.