Organizational strategies in immediate recall of rapid speech by young and elderly adults

Young and elderly adults heard recorded passages of meaningful prose with instructions to interrupt the speech at points of their choosing for immediate recall on a segment by segment basis. At normal speech rates both young and elderly subjects segmented passages primarily at coherent syntactic boundaries and showed equivalent recall performance. Increasing the passages' speech rate produced a significant reduction in recall performance for the elderly subjects relative to the young even though their segmentation strategies remained the same. Results were attributed to an age-sensitive encoding difficulty at a level higher than surface syntactic parsing.