Age and Decision Strategies in Running Memory for Speech: Effects of Prosody and Linguistic Structure

Young and elderly adults heard recorded passages of English prose spoken with and without normal prosody, and passages that were devoid of either linguistic or prosodic structure. Subjects were instructed to interrupt the speech input at points of their choosing for immediate recall on a segment-by-segment basis. For both age groups segmentation strategies varied with type of speech materials as did their levels of recall accuracy. Age differences in recall performance were diminished by the presence of normal prosody, an effect only partially attributable to the use of prosody to detect linguistic boundaries at the surface level.