Comprehension of Pronouns in Young and Older Adults

The issue of whether young (19-37 years) and older (57-84 years) adults differ in their use of pragmatic information in anaphor resolution was explored in three experiments. Subjects were required to select the antecedent for the pronoun he in sentence pairs such as Henry spoke at a meeting while John drove to the beach. He brought along a surfboard . Young and older adults were equally influenced by contextual constraints in choosing pronoun referents when the sentence containing the pronoun followed immediately after the context-setting sentence. When extraneous material intervened, however, both age groups became less consistent in their pronoun choices, with older adults being more affected. Evidence is presented that failure to use pragmatic constraints in pronoun assignment results from inability to recall the relevant contextual information.