Social Context Effects on Story Recall in Older and Younger Women: Does the Listener Make a Difference?

Abstract

The story-recall performance of older and younger women was examined within an oral story-retelling context with two listener conditions. Forty-eight older women (M age = 67.81 years; SD = 2.62) and 47 younger women (M age = 20.47 years; SD = 1.53) were asked to learn one of two stories with the goal to retell the story from memory either to an experimenter or to a young child. Did the listener make a difference in story recall? Yes. Although age-group differences in propositional recall favoring the younger women occurred when an experimenter was the listener, there were no age-group differences when a child was the listener. In addition, when a child was listening, both older and younger tellers adapted their narratives by producing more elaborations and repetitions, as well as by simplifying the more complex of the two stories. Across stories, however, the older tellers adjusted the complexity of their retellings to the age of their listeners more than did the younger tellers. Results highlight the importance of considering the social context of remembering in memory-aging research.

Aging and self-regulated language processing.

“…Another example is when there is a functional social context for memory, as in the case of telling stories to children. Adams, Smith, Pasupathi, and Vitolo (2002) replicated the typical finding of age deficits in text memory when younger and older adults were asked to recall Sufi tales that they had read to an experimenter, whereas age deficits were eliminated when the participants were asked to retell these stories to children (who presumably did not already know the story and would enjoy hearing it).…”

“…Age differences in resource allocation may play a role in (a) the manifestation of age-related changes itself, and (b) compensatory changes in allocation policy. Concerning the latter, the ability to regulate language input so as to accommodate to age-related change may be highly variable due to (a) variability in the resource consumption demands of self-regulation itself (Kanfer & Ackerman, 1996), (b) individual differences in relevant knowledge in specific contexts, given the influence of knowledge-based processing (Miller & Stine-Morrow, 1998;Miller, Stine-Morrow et al, 2004;Miller, Cohen, & Wingfield, in press), and (c) affective and motivational factors such as interest in the passage content (Meyer, Talbot, Stubblefield, & Poon, 1998), emotional content (Carstensen & Turk-Charles, 1994), social context (Adams et al, 2002)), and selfreferent beliefs about cognition and control that influence the recruitment of resources (e.g., Cavanaugh, 1990;Miller & Lachman, 1999). Whereas age deficits may well be the rule for decontextualized laboratory tasks (e.g., varied attentional mapping, paired associate learning, list learning; e.g., Kausler, 1994), discourse memory is one area of cognitive aging where this may not universally be the case (Hultsch & Dixon, 1984;Johnson, 2003).…”

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 …”

Academic Press is an imprint of Elsevier

“…The conjunction of reduced syntactic complexity and increased narrative quality or focus on discourse level has been interpreted variously as an accommodation to decreases in processing resources or to growing expertise in the communicative nature of discourse (Adams et al, 1997;Kemper, 1990;Kemper et al, 1990), as well as to differences across age in the interpretation of what it means to tell a story or recall a narrative (Adams et al, 2002). This pattern of reduced grammatical complexity, increased structural complexity, and greater elaboration does not, however, mean that all aspects of discourse become more reader or listener friendly in old age.…”

“…Interestingly, in referential communication tasks, older adults vary little in the ways in which they convey route information to young and older targets (Kemper et al, 1995. This does not appear to reflect an inability to change register as a result of working memory or other global age-related deficits -older adults do accommodate when speaking to cognitively impaired partners (Gould & Shaleen, 1999;Kemper et al, 1994) and in retelling stories to children (Adams et al, 2002). There are heated debates in the psycholinguistic literature about issues of common ground -the extent to which speakers take into account the specific conversational needs of their audience (Horton & Keysar, 1996;Lockridge & Brennan, 2002).…”