Enhancing older adults' reading comprehension

Syntactic measures, as well as measures of sentence content, were used with hierarchical multiple regression techniques to investigate older adults' reading comprehension. Older adults' reading difficulty, as measured by a test of comprehension and words-per-minute reading rates, appears to be due to the use of propositionally dense sentences and complex syntactic structures. This analysis provides clear guidelines for the preparation of prose materials targeted for older readers.