Riggs, K. M., Wingfield, A., & Tun, P. A. (1993). Passage difficulty, speech rate, and age differences in memory for spoken text: Speech recall and the complexity hypothesis. Experimental Aging Research, 19(2), 111-128.

Riggs, K.; Wingfield, A.; Tun, P.

1993

Riggs, K. M., Wingfield, A., & Tun, P. A. (1993). Passage difficulty, speech rate, and age differences in memory for spoken text: Speech recall and the complexity hypothesis. Experimental Aging Research, 19(2), 111-128.

geen

Studied memory for speech in 18 undergraduates and 18 elderly adults (aged 61-79 yrs) by varying speech rate and average predictability of prose passages (measured by a "cloze" procedure). Increased speech rate and decreased predictability yielded poorer memory performance on retention measures of free recall, cued recall, and multiple-choice recognition, confirming passage predictability as a good predictor of empirical difficulty of a speech passage. Elderly Ss recalled less than younger Ss on all 3 measures, with increasing speech rates producing special difficulty for elderly Ss relative to young Ss. Neither age group showed an interaction between passage predictability and speech rate.

Our results are clear in showing that average predictability scores of the speech passages had a significant effect on recall performance for the passages, and that this was true at all speech rates and for both subject groups tested. Increased speech rate and decreased predictability yielded poorer memory performance on three retention measures, confirming passage predictability as a good predictor of empirical difficulty of a speech passage.

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