Aging and the Effects of Knowledge on On-Line Reading Strategies

Abstract

The effects of knowledge on on-line reading strategies and the relation of these effects to subsequent memory performance among young and elderly adults were investigated. Participants read passages with vague, ill-defined content word-by-word on a computer screen for immediate recall and reading times were recorded. High-knowledge (HK) readers received passage titles that clarified the content and low-knowledge (LK) readers did not. Reading strategy was found to be related to age, knowledge, and subsequent recall performance. LK readers, particularly those who produced high levels of recall, spent differentially more time at intrasentence and sentence boundaries suggesting that they allocated more processing resources to consolidate the concepts in the seemingly disjointed text. HK readers, on the other hand, showed facilitation in this organizational processing. These beneficial effects were more pronounced for elderly readers than for younger readers, suggesting that older readers take special advantage of knowledge in the on-line processing of discourse. Moreover, older LK readers who were above average in recall were differentially slowed at boundaries showing that successful older readers who lacked a situation model with which to interpret text allocated differentially more time to organize and integrate text than did their younger counterparts.

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

“…Other studies have shown that older adult readers tend to spend relatively less time on the ends of syntactic constituents such as ends of clauses and sentences than do young readers (L. M. S. Miller & Stine-Morrow, 1998;Stine, 1990;Stine & Hindman, 1994). Although the older adults in the present study paused significantly longer at the ends of sentences than at the other boundary types, they spent less time than the young at the ends of clauses.…”

“…Finally, reading studies have indicated that both young and older adults' reading times decrease as more ofa passage is read (L. M. S. Miller & Stine-Morrow, 1998;Stine et al, 1995;Stine et al, 1996). This pattern of data has been interpreted in the reading literature as reflecting the initial construction ofa situational discourse model early in the texts that facilitates the subsequent encoding of text material (e.g., Gernsbacher, 1990).…”

Aging and situation model processing

“…Moreover, the sizes of the reading time effects were comparable in the younger and the older adults (see also Stine-Morrow, Loveless, &Soederberg, 1996, andStine-Morrow, 1998, for a similar outcome using serial position as a measure of situation model processing). That is, when the narratives described shifts in space or time, there was a new agent or goal introduced in the stories, or there was a break in the causal structure, people slowed down when reading these passages.…”

Adult age differences in the effects of goals on self-regulated sentence processing.

“…However, these constraints must be contextualized in terms of a system that may be relatively more sensitive to socioemotional goals in learning (e.g., Adams et al, 2002), more attuned to situational features (e.g., Dijkstra, Yaxley, Madden, & Zwaan, 2004;Stine-Morrow, Morrow, & Leno, 2002;Stine-Morrow et al, 2004), and more adept at exploiting knowledge (Miller & Stine-Morrow, 1998;Miller, Cohen, & Wingfield, in press;Miller, Stine-Morrow, Kirkorian, & Conroy, 2004) and the higher-order structures of discourse (Stine-Morrow, Miller, Gagne, & Hertzog, submitted). Table 2 Hierarchical Regressions Predicting Recall Performance and Encoding Efficiency …”