Immediate recall of syntactically complex sentences in young and elderly subjects

Abstract

The current study explores the relationship between ageing, individual working memory capacity and syntactic complexity, using an immediate sentence recall task to determine whether age and working memory affect the capacity of elderly people to accurately reproduce long and short versions of center- and right-embedded object relative clauses immediately after they have been heard. The results showed no statistically significant differences between the performances of young and elderly subjects participating in the study, and suggested there is no decline in working memory capacity associated to the recall of syntactically complex sentences as part of normal ageing.