Communication during prose recall conversations by young and old dyads

This study focused on the cooperative processes occurring during collaborative prose recall by adult dyads differing in age (young and old) and relationship (married and unacquainted). Analyses of the content of the conversations indicate that all groups produced similar proportions of story‐related and conversation‐related productions. At the beginning of the conversations, individual stimulus‐based productions were predominant. The end of the conversations were characterized by increased proportions of task discussion, particularly for married couples, and an increase in sociability/support productions by older adults, particularly older unacquainted dyads. Thus, all groups adopted the arguably superior strategy of beginning their recall conversations with an initial surge of individually recalled story information, and it was only at the end of the conversation that group differences in collaboration strategies were observed.