Existing knowledge of linguistic structure mitigates associative memory deficits in older adults

ABSTRACT

Background/Study Context: Older adults show lower memory performance than younger adults when a task requires them to create associations (Naveh-Benjamin, 2000, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26, 1170–1187). In this study, associative memory was examined in order to assess whether age differences in performance were mitigated when the word pairs to be learned utilized a familiar pattern seen in everyday language (adjective-noun), which we propose as a type of schematic support that capitalizes upon linguistic structure.

Methods: Thirty older (66–87 years old) and younger (18–22 years old) adults from the University of Missouri and the surrounding community studied word pairs in noun-noun, adjective-noun, and noun-adjective sequences. A mixed-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to analyze differences in memory sensitivity (d’) and response bias (C) from separate item and associative recognition memory tests between age groups and between word pair sequences.

Results: As expected, older participants did show lower associative memory for noun-noun and noun-adjective pairs than younger adults, a hallmark of an age-related associative binding deficit, but there were no age differences in associative memory for adjective-noun pairs. The latter supports our hypothesis that seeing word pairs in a familiar adjective-noun linguistic sequence can provide support in older adults’ associative processing to mitigate difficulties experienced when binding together word pairs.Conclusion: The results obtained show that older adults can use prior existing knowledge to attenuate their cognitive shortcomings, specifically linguistic structural knowledge, to mitigate their associative binding deficit. Further research is necessary to determine the exact mechanism of improvement mediated by this form of schematic support, namely, whether it results in more effective recruitment of strategic processes such as unitization.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Brittney Wolfangel and Cortney Howard for help with data collection.

Notes

¹ To make analyses comparable across word pairings, we used item memory for nouns only, as adjectives were not used in the N-N condition; however, separate analyses including adjectives showed identical results. Memory for individual words was lower for adjectives in comparison with nouns, t(59) = 5.94, p < .001.

² An analysis using hits minus false alarms rates showed the exact same patterns as those obtained for d’.

³ Results from Naveh-Benjamin et al. (2012) indicated that age-related associative memory deficits are more pronounced in males than females. The ratio of females to males in this study, which was high overall, and in particular in the older participants’ (21/30) than in the younger participants’ group, only strengthens our results. That is, even with a majority of our older participant group being females, we obtained evidence of an associative memory deficit in the N-N control condition.

⁴ These results for younger adults are different from those reported by Paivio (1963) and Lambert and Paivio (1956) for younger adults, which indicated better performance in N-A than in A-N pairs. However, Paivio’s studies used either a cued-recall test or an anticipation method, both of which are somewhat ambiguous with respect to the contributions of associative versus item memory to performance, whereas our procedure allows the assessment of the specific contributions of associative memory by the use of an associative recognition task.

⁵ The majority of participants reported mentally switching the order of the words when studying N-A pairs, but there was no evidence that switching the order of the words in the N-A pairs was beneficial to associative memory in the subset of younger adults (25 of 30 participants) or older adults (24 of 30 participants) who reported using this strategy.

⁶ An alternative explanation is that higher intrinsic within-pair semantic relatedness for A-N pairs, rather than familiar linguistic structure, mediated higher associative memory for A-N pairs over N-N pairs. However, this is not likely to be the case because (a) the age-related associative memory deficit that was apparent in the overall analysis of d’ scores in the associative test for N-N pairs and the lack of an age difference in associative memory performance also persisted, regardless of whether word pairs were of high or low semantic relatedness; and (b) higher associative memory was not observed for word pairs with high semantic relatedness in comparison with word pairs with low semantic relatedness for either A-N or N-A pairs in younger or older adults.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a Research Council grant from the University of Missouri.