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Sentence Production by Young and Older Adults in Controlled Contexts

Gerontology Center, University of Kansas, Lawrence.

Address correspondence to Susan Kemper, Gerontology Center, 1000 Sunnyside Avenue, Room 3090, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045. E-mail: Skemper{at}KU.edu

In this experiment we compared young and older adults' abilities to produce complex sentences under controlled conditions. We asked participants to memorize sentence stems differing in syntactical complexity and then to produce a complete sentence using the stem. The length, complexity, and content of young adults' responses varied with the syntactical complexity of the stems, whereas older adults' responses did not. These results suggest that working memory processing limitations impose a "ceiling" on older adults' production of complex sentences, limiting their length, complexity, and content.