Aging and Text Comprehension: Interpretation and Domain Knowledge Advantage

Abstract

In this study, young, middle-aged, and elderly adults read two different history texts. In the knowledge advantage condition, readers read a history text about an event that was well-known to readers of all ages but most familiar to elderly adults. In the no advantage condition, readers read a history text about a political situation of a country that no age groups knew much about. After reading the text, readers recalled and interpreted the texts. Comparison of the recall and the interpretation performance showed that while recall was best in the young group and declined with age, interpretation did not. The middle-aged and elderly adults generated interpretations that were equally deep and more synthetic than those of the young adults. They also generated interpretations with more diverse rationale statements. As for the effect of knowledge advantage its effect on text recall was straightforward: although not significant, age-group differences in recall were smaller in the knowledge advantage condition than in the no advantage condition, suggesting that age-related decline in recall can be moderated by older adults' knowledge advantage. The effect of knowledge advantage on text interpretation was less clear-cut. While knowledge facilitated interpretations, the facilitation was not uniform across different measures of interpretations, suggesting a complex interaction between text interpretation and knowledge.