Telling tales: Aging, working memory, and the narrative cohesion of story retellings.

This study investigated adult age differences in the cohesion of narrative retellings in both the reference and conjunction discourse systems and explored the role of information-processing factors in accounting for any such differences. Twenty Ss in each of the age groups 18–25, 26–55, and 60–87 either read a story or its parallel cartoon version, then retold it twice. Stories were coded for recall, clarity of referencing, and types of propositional connectives. We also obtained Daneman's (1980) measure of sentence memory span. The oldest group scored significantly lower on the memory span measure, recalled less story information, and made more referential errors in retellings. There were no age differences in complexity of conjunction usage. Working memory span scores partly accounted for the differences observed in referential quality both within and between age groups. Results are generally consistent with an information-processing account of story telling and aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)