Educational Context Differences in Prose Recall in Adulthood

Content familiarity and syntactic complexity of target propositions were manipulated in short narratives. The subjects were 36 women divided equally into three groups on the basis of age and educational status: in-school young women (M = 21.6 years), out-of-school young women (M = 21.4 years), and old women (M = 70.3 years). Performance varied with educational status: The in-school young women outperformed the other two groups on measures of working memory and prose recall. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that (a) intrusions in free recall were associated with higher rated familiarity, (b) working memory accounted for a significant portion of the variance in recall from syntactically complex constructions, and (c) age had no predictive relationship with the recall of left-branching embeddings when differences in working memory were controlled. These results suggest a contextual conception of individual differences in discourse processing emphasizing the adaptive demands of different age contexts and their influences on performance.