Old Words, New Meanings: Aging and Sense Creation

JOURNAL OF MEMORY AND LANGUAGE ARTICLE NO.

35, 689–707 (1996)

0036

Old Words, New Meanings: Aging and Sense Creation ELIZABETH M. ZELINSKI

AND

JEFFREY C. HYDE

Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, Andrus Gerontology Center, University of Southern California We assessed adult age differences in interpretations of eponymous noun phrases (e.g., do an Elvis Edmunds). In Experiment 1, young and old participants produced interpretations after reading vignettes describing three actions of fictitious eponyms. One of the actions was the intended interpretation, and cues either did or did not restrict the interpretation to that action. Although both age groups were sensitive to interpretation cues, young adults were likely to produce the intended interpretation, but older participants generalized across all actions. The results of Experiment 2 replicated this pattern under conditions in which subjects received more practice and misleading contextual information was removed. Experiment 3 tested whether older adults’ tendency to generalize was due to the retrieval requirements of production by using a verification task. Older participants did not differ from the young in verifying intended interpretations but were at chance in rejecting generalizations, suggesting that older adults may have a deficit in semantic processing. q 1996 Academic Press, Inc.

In the last decade, much has been learned about aging and language. Although it was assumed that problems in comprehending and producing language only existed in groups of older adults who had experienced brain injuries, current work shows that language difficulties can also be observed in the neurologically normal elderly. Problems arise for older people when material has to be remembered (see Light, 1990). For example, older adults have difficulty in recalling written discourse (see Zelinski & Gilewski, 1988, for a review), in assigning pronouns to anaphora when a Preparation of this paper was funded in part by NIA R01AG4114 and R01AG10569 to the senior author and by NIA 2 T32 AG00037 to the Andrus Gerontology Center. The authors thank Cheri Anthony-Bergstone, Grace Sit Chan, Catherine Lee, Shari Miura, Jason Olin, Mitchell Stoddard, and Stuart Stoll for assistance in developing materials, testing participants, and scoring, and to Peggy Hollander of the New Horizons Condominium Club for recruiting older participants for Experiment 3. The authors gratefully acknowledge the comments of Cindy Lahar, Leah Light, and Anthony Perry on earlier drafts of this paper, as well as the suggestions of David Balota and three anonymous reviewers. Address correspondence and reprint requests to the senior author at the School of Gerontology, Andrus Gerontology Center, University of Southern California, Los Angeles 90089-0191 or to [email protected].

topic shift occurs between coreferents (Light & Capps, 1986), and in either repeating syntactically complex sentences or determining their grammaticality (see Kemper, 1992, for a review). Older people do not appear to be impaired, however, as long as they remember referential information, or in everyday circumstances where memory load is relatively low. This leads to the conclusion that impairments in explicit memory processes are responsible for language comprehension deficits in aging (Light, 1992). Most studies of comprehension in older adults address their understanding of discourse under circumstances where the representations of words are accessed from memory and the sense of the utterance is selected from existing representations. It is therefore unsurprising that retrieval problems could be the cause of comprehension problems. However, this conclusion may not apply to another aspect of linguistic competence in older adults—how they create sense. In the creation of sense, existing representations cannot be readily used to interpret utterances, and contextual information must be relied upon for successful comprehension. Whether age differences exist in sense creation is not known. Compare the following utterances:

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(1) I erased the potentially damaging recording from the tape,

with (2) I did a Richard Nixon to the tape

(based on Clark & Gerrig, 1983). It is very unlikely that any of the existing representations of the individual words in (2) could be combined to derive the meaning of erasing incriminating evidence as in (1) without some process of sense creation. Age-related deficits in sense creation would indicate that older adults have difficulty with an important aspect of everyday language comprehension. Clark (1983) has shown that ability to infer a new sense of already known words is a common requirement in both reading and listening. Some theorists suggest that word senses must be created for virtually all utterances to accommodate nuances in meaning as a function of context (e.g., Anderson, 1990). Thus, this research is important in understanding the scope of age changes in language comprehension. Sense creation involves deriving a meaning that is not closely related to existing representations of concepts, but involves coordinating and integrating contextual information. This suggests that sense creation involves the initial steps of developing new semantic associations in explicit memory. Light and her colleagues (Light, LaVoie, & Kennison, 1995) found no age differences in the repetition priming of newly associated material (nonwords), suggesting that age deficits in the explicit learning of new associations are not due to difficulty in integration, but to impairments in either the encoding processes underlying context-dependent retrieval operations or to retrieval itself. Age dissociations in sense creation would suggest that older adults have special difficulties in encoding new associations or to retrieving them. In this paper, we describe three experiments addressing age differences in the process of sense creation as seen in (2). The pattern of age differences in sense creation will identify which of three popular accounts of age impairments in the explicit learning of

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new associations, a deficit in working memory capacity (e.g., Kemper, 1992), a decline in explicit memory retrieval with age (Light, 1992), or a semantic processing deficit (Craik & Jennings, 1992), best explains the findings. The task used in the experiments was a pure sense creation task, involving fictitious individuals, with materials always present during trials, so that interpretations were independent of preexperimental knowledge and explicit recall. The experiments were based on a paradigm developed by Clark and Gerrig (1983; Experiment 2). People were presented with 48 vignettes in the form Imagine that a friend of yours told you about his neighbor Elvis Edmunds. Elvis is a very creative guy. He built a table and chairs for his five-yearold son. He owns his own luggage and leather repair shop and really enjoys making things look like new. To supplement his income, Elvis carves fruit into exotic shapes for the delicatessen down the road. (3) Later your friend says that he has thought about doing an Elvis Edmunds to the apples he bought. (4) Later your friend says that he has thought about doing an Elvis Edmunds. Doing an Elvis Edmunds means . . . ?

There were three actions in each vignette about the eponym. The actions were thematically related to the summary statement Elvis is a very creative guy: He built a table and chairs; he really enjoys making things look like new. One action was unusual, so that it would be considered salient (Elvis carves fruit into exotic shapes). Half the vignettes ended with cues restricting the interpretation to the unusual action (carving fruit into exotic shapes) as in (3), and the remaining vignettes ended without restricting cues by mentioning no particular action, as in (4). Clark and Gerrig (1983; Experiment 2) found that college students were generally likely to report the unusual action as the interpretation. Restricting cues as in (3) increase the likelihood that such interpretations will take place. When the context is not restricting, as in (4), people are likely to generalize their interpretations across all three actions. Clark and Gerrig (1983) suggested that cre-

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ating the sense of an eponymous noun phrase involves retrieval of relevant information from long-term memory, availability of contextual information, and matching of context to relevant information by judging similarities between these elements to arrive at the intended interpretation. We apply Clark and Gerrig’s (1983) model to assess age differences and to address possible deficits in how older adults might create sense. Working memory capacity and sense creation. Age-related declines in working memory capacity (see, e.g., Kemper, 1992) may be a factor in the ability to match potentially relevant information from memory with context to create sense. A working memory capacity deficit model predicts an interaction of age with distance between the intended action and the eponymous noun phrase. Older adults should be most likely to produce intended interpretations when the target salient actions appear just before the eponymous noun phrase and least likely to produce them when the target appears several sentences before it, compared to younger people who can maintain more distant information. The model also predicts that older people will generalize across all three actions when the distance between the target action and eponymous noun phrase is greater than one sentence. This would occur because encoding of the thematic information in the vignette is automatic (Rabinowitz, Craik, & Ackerman, 1982), and this information should remain in working memory, even if there is a reduction in capacity (see Just & Carpenter, 1992). Explicit memory and sense creation. An alternative model involves age-related deficits in explicit memory processes. Light and her colleagues (Light, Owens, Mahoney, & LaVoie, 1993) suggest that in interpretation tasks involving figurative language, older adults have difficulty in retrieving and articulating their responses. This results in interpretations that are not as germane to the intended meaning as young adults’. An explicit memory deficit model would predict that older adults’ interpretations in the sense creation task should be more likely to reflect the general

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theme of the vignettes rather than the more specific intended actions. Varying the distance of the target action from the eponymous noun phrase should not affect performance because the explicit retrieval problem is at the point of articulating the concept, not recalling related material. Finally, the explicit memory deficit model would predict that although older people might not be able to produce the intended interpretation in the sense creation task, they would recognize it as such in a verification task. Here we would expect that with restricting cues, older people would be as likely to verify the intended interpretation, but not the generalized one, as the young. Semantic processing deficits. A semantic processing deficit model also predicts a greater tendency for older adults to produce generalized interpretations independent of the distance between the target action and the eponymous noun phrase. Craik and Byrd (1982) suggest that as people grow older, they encode information in stereotypical ways, relying on knowledge from long-term memory rather than episodic context. As a result, encoding is impoverished, because context is not integrated with the material to be remembered. If older people are unable to integrate individual actions with the context, their interpretations will be more likely to be general than those of younger people. The semantic deficit model would additionally predict that, even in verification, older adults will endorse both specific and generalized interpretations. Here, specific interpretations would be acceptable because they would involve elements of meaning that match a generalization. Similarly, in a verification task, we would also expect that older adults should be more likely to endorse nontarget actions as true, because the nontarget actions should match the generalization to some extent. We would not predict, however, that nontargets should be as acceptable as target actions because target actions should contain more elements matching the generalization than nontargets. For example if older people encode doing an Elvis Edmunds means being a cre-

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ative guy, not only does carve fruit into exotic shapes fit as a potential interpretation of the eponymous noun phrase, so does build a table and chairs for his 5-year-old. Both are creative acts, but fruit carving is probably more ‘‘creative’’ than furniture building. The semantic processing deficit model therefore predicts different patterns for verification accuracy in participants of different age groups. EXPERIMENT 1 The main purpose of Experiment 1 was to establish the existence of age differences in sense creation by examining patterns of interpretations of eponymous noun phrases. The experiment was designed to distinguish between the model of age deficits in working memory and the models of explicit memory or semantic processing deficits. To do this, we varied the location of the salient actions in the vignettes, so that they occured one, two, or three sentences before the eponymous noun phrase. We also measured latencies to read each action sentence and to produce interpretations. However, we will not present the response latency results, as they did not compromise the arguments regarding interpretation accuracy. In Experiment 1, participants read the sentences of the vignettes, one at a time, on a computer screen, and reading times for individual sentences were recorded. Latencies were measured for reading times so that we could determine that participants differentiated the target action from the nontargets with longer reading times (recall that the target action is unusual). Although older participants would be expected to have longer latencies than younger ones because of age-related cognitive slowing, we would not expect older participants to be especially slowed in reading target sentences, as suggested by parallel age patterns in reading time across a variety of conditions (e.g., Zelinski, 1988). Method Participants. Participants were 26 young adults and 28 older adults. Breakdowns by

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gender are seen in Table 1. Younger participants were recruited from undergraduate psychology courses at the University of Southern California. Older participants were recruited from the Andrus Volunteers, a service group of retirees, at the Andrus Gerontology Center, and from the community. Means and standard deviations for age, self-rating of health on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being excellent, years of schooling, and the vocabulary subtest from the Shipley Institute of Living Scale (Shipley, 1940) are shown in Table 1. Older adults had reliably higher vocabulary scores, F(1,52) Å 16.71. There were no age differences in educational level or self-rated health, F’s õ 1. Apparatus. The equipment was a black/ amber screen Apple//Plus computer with a Lafayette voice activated relay attached to an internal DI09 timer card, which was also used to collect reading time data. Materials and procedure. The sense creation task consisted of 48 short vignettes as described. The distance of the target action from the eponymous noun phrase was counterbalanced, with targets occurring one, two, or three sentences before it. Half of the final statements in vignettes contained cues restricting the interpretation to the salient action, and half contained no restricting cues, and this was counterbalanced. Participants were given written instructions about the sense creation task, describing the vignettes and the interpretation procedure, but were told only to interpret the eponymous noun phrase as they thought appropriate. They completed two practice vignettes in the written instructions, and then were introduced to the procedure for completing the main task on the computer. Participants read sentences at their own pace, pressing the space bar to present additional sentences, one at a time. The computer timed the interval between keypresses. The text remained on the screen until the eponymous noun phrase appeared. Participants then stated the interpretation, and the time between the appearance of the question and the onset of the vocalization was recorded. The vignette was erased from the screen when the voice

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8 18 73.71 (5.78) 15.20 (2.41) 36.79 (2.59) 7.93 (1.62)

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TABLE 2 Categorization of Samples of Interpretations of doing an Elvis Edmunds

Note. Standard deviations are in parentheses. a Experiment 1 and 3 scores are from the Shipley-Hartford vocabulary subtest: Experiment 2 scores are from the WAIS-R Vocabulary subtest.

6 20 24.81 (6.72) 14.84 (1.37) 31.11 (3.50) 8.10 (1.21) 11 20 69.91 (5.12) 16.06 (2.58) 28.94 (5.54) 8.40 (1.34) 17 14 20.36 (2.96) 14.45 (1.03) 25.10 (5.83) 9.00 (1.12) Number of males Number of females Mean age Years of education Vocabulary scorea Health rating

8 18 22.18 (3.49) 15.96 (2.57) 34.23 (2.86) 8.59 (1.40)

8 20 67.82 (7.08) 16.00 (2.37) 37.57 (2.96) 8.86 (0.97)

Old Young Young

Experiment 1

Old

Experiment 2

Subject Characteristics

TABLE 1

Young

Experiment 3

Old

SENSE CREATION

Intended Carve fruit into weird shapes Doing exotic designs for hobby or profit He would like to carve them into exotic shapes! Carve fruit into exotic shapes Generalization Creatively enjoy what you do Working hard to improve family life, earning a good living and being creative at the same time Being creative, artistic and original Being creative with art Nontarget Building a table and chairs He wants to own his own luggage and leather repair shop Repairing and fixing things Make or repair something Irrelevant Really different!

key relay closed. The entire session was taperecorded and interpretations were later transcribed. Scoring and analysis. Examples of interpretations and the scoring scheme are shown in Table 2. Responses that involved the gist of the targeted action meaning (doing an Elvis Edmunds means cutting fruit into odd shapes) were scored as intended; those that involved a summary of the actions (doing an Elvis Edmunds means being a very creative guy) were scored as generalizations; those that involved one of the two other actions mentioned in the vignette (doing an Elvis Edmunds means fixing luggage; doing an Elvis Edmunds means making furniture for a child) were scored as nontarget; and those that did not refer to any of the material presented in the vignette (doing an Elvis Edmunds means having a sense of humor) were scored as irrelevant. About 8.5% of the 2592 total responses involved nontarget actions, and 1.4% were irrelevant. Irrelevant interpretations did not differ by age or cue condition, and so they will not be analyzed further. As seen in Table 2, there is only one example of an irrelevant interpretation for in-

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terpreting doing an Elvis Edmunds from all the protocols of Experiments 1 and 2. Results The level of significance for all analyses was set at p õ .05. Analyses for interpretations were conducted with participants as random and are referenced as F1. Analyses were also conducted with items as random, referenced as F2. Reading Time Analyses The reading times for actions in each vignette were trimmed, excluding the 4% exceeding 3 SD’s greater or less than the participants’ mean times. They were analyzed in multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVA) with age (young, old) and target status (intended, nontarget) of the action statements as the factors. The effects of restricting cues are not analyzed here, as the actions preceded statements involving cues and would be unaffected by condition. We also analyzed differences in reading times between the two nontarget items in vignettes and found no differences, and so collapsed data across nontarget items. Although there were no differences in the number of words across target and nontarget actions (t Å 0), people read the targeted action much more slowly than the nontarget actions, F(1,52) Å 257.73, with young people reading targets for a mean of 3717 ms and the old, 4806. The corresponding times for nontargets were 3166 for the young and 4244 for the old. As is often found, older people read more slowly than the young, F(1,52) Å 10.45, but reading times across the two types of items did not interact with age, F õ 1. These results extend the findings of Clark and Gerrig (1983) to reading times, that participants were sensitive to the unusual action. The absence of an age interaction with action type suggests that older people are also sensitive to the salience of the intended action.

1

Interpretations The mean proportion of interpretations within the various scoring classifications as a

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function of age, cue, and distance from the eponymous noun phrase are shown in Table 3. We analyzed intended interpretations, generalizations, and nontarget responses in MANOVAs with the factors of Age (young, old), Cue Condition (restricting, no restricting), and Distance (1, 2, or 3 sentences from the eponymous noun phrase). Intended interpretations. As seen in Table 3, participants were more likely to interpret the unusual action as the intended meaning if the cue was restricting (.640) than if it was not (.287), F1(1,52) Å 92.83; F2(1,45) Å 108.31. The effect of distance was reliable for participants, multivariate F1(2,51) Å 3.86, but not for items, F2 õ 1. The Cue 1 Distance interaction was significant, multivariate F1(2,51) Å 11.63, for participants, but marginal, multivariate F2(2,45) Å 2.48, p õ .10, for items. Univariate contrasts of intended interpretations at distance 1 with distance 3 were significant, F1(1,52) Å 20.09; F2(1,46) Å 4.31. Newman–Keuls analyses showed that when there were restricting cues, the distance of the intended action from the eponymous noun phrase had no reliable effect on interpretations (distance 3 mean Å .674; distance 1 mean Å .615). However when there were no restricting cues, more intended interpretations were produced for target actions at a distance of 1 (mean Å .378) than a distance of 3 (mean Å .231) sentences from the eponymous noun phrase. The explanation of the interaction is straightforward: when there are no restricting cues, participants use the principle of most recent mention to assign the interpretation to an action. Older people were less likely to produce the intended interpretations (mean Å .400) than younger ones (.526), F1(1,52) Å 5.64; F2(1,45) Å 46.38.1 Age did not interact with cue, both F’s õ 1. The Age 1 Distance interaction was significant, multivariate F1(2,51) Å 3.03; multivariate F2(2,45) Å 5.11. Univar-

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The discrepancy in F1 and F2 ratios for the age main effect in Experiments 1 and 2 is due to the different sources of error terms across analyses: it is between-subjects for F1 and within-subjects for F2.

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SENSE CREATION TABLE 3 Mean Proportion of Interpretations as a Function of Age, Cue Condition, and Category Experiment 1

Intended Restricting cues No restricting cues Generalization Restricting cues No restricting cues Nontarget Restricting cues No restricting cues

Experiment 2

Young

Old

Young

Old

.689 (.210) .362 (.235)

.590 (.281) .211 (.190)

.726 (.216) .315 (.182)

.526 (.302) .266 (.197)

.239 (.207) .509 (.270)

.353 (.252) .650 (.205)

.212 (.190) .487 (.274)

.382 (.295) .568 (.250)

.070 (.082) .118 (.099)

.034 (.038) .117 (.092)

.056 (.069) .187 (.170)

.070 (.100) .139 (.155)

Note. Standard deviations are in parentheses.

iate tests contrasting age differences at distance 1 versus distance 3, F1(1,52) Å 5.76; F2(1,46) Å 9.08 were significant. Newman– Keuls simple effects tests revealed that older participants showed no distance effects (distance 3 mean Å .411; distance 1 mean Å .404), but young participants produced fewer intended interpretations at a distance of 3 (mean Å .495) than a distance of 1 (mean Å .590). The Age 1 Cue 1 Distance interaction was not reliable for either analysis, multivariate F’s õ 1. Generalized interpretations. The mean proportion of generalizations produced had essentially mirror-image results compared to the findings for the intended interpretations. Participants were more likely to produce generalizations with no restricting cues (mean Å .580) than with them (mean Å .296), F1(1,52) Å 83.68; F2(1,45) Å 57.79. The main effect of distance was not reliable, multivariate F1(2,51) Å 2.22; F2 õ 1. The Cue 1 Distance interaction was unstable: it was significant across participants, multivariate F1(2,51) Å 5.16, but not items, F2 õ 1. Older adults were more likely to produce generalizations (mean Å .502) than younger ones (mean Å .374), F1(1,52) Å 4.94; F2(1,45) Å 60.13. There were no Age 1 Cue interactions, F1 and F2 õ 1. There was a marginal Age 1 Distance interaction for

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the analysis over participants, multivariate F1(2,51) Å 2.47, p õ .10, but it was significant over items, F2(2,45) Å 6.26. Univariate tests contrasting age differences at distance 1 with distance 3 were nonsignificant across participants F1(1,52) Å 2.35, but were significant across items, F2(1,46) Å 9.65. Newman–Keuls simple effects tests showed that older participants produced more generalizations when intended actions were at a distance of 1 (mean Å .522) than at a distance of 3 (mean Å .477). For young participants, there were no differences in generalizations as a function of distance (distance 3 Å .362 and distance 1 Å .340). There was no Age 1 Cue 1 Distance interaction, both F’s õ 1. Nontarget interpretations. Analysis of the proportion of interpretations based on nontargets indicated that people were more likely to use nontargets in their interpretations with no restricting cues (mean Å .117) than with restricting cues (mean Å .052), F1(1,52) Å 25.05; F2(1,45) Å 18.94. The effect of distance was reliable for the analysis across participants, multivariate F1(2,51) Å 7.15, and marginal across items, F2(2,45) Å 2.93, p õ .06. Univariate tests contrasting distance 1 with distance 3 showed that production of a nontarget as the interpretation was more likely when the salient action was at a distance of 3 (mean Å .114) than a distance of 1 (mean Å

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.055), F1(1,52) Å 13.68; F2(1,46) Å 6.93. The Cue 1 Distance interaction was unstable: reliable for participants, multivariate F1(2,51) Å 4.75, but not for items, F2(2,45) Å 2.20. There were no effects involving age or interactions with age. For age, F1(1,52) Å 1.07; F2(1,45) Å 2.21; for Age 1 Cue, F1(1,52) Å 1.79; F2(1,45) Å 1.09, for Age 1 Distance, multivariate F1(2,51) Å 2.31; multivariate F2(2,45) Å 1.92; and for Age 1 Cue 1 Distance, multivariate F1(2,51) Å 1.72; multivariate F2 õ 1. Discussion As Clark and Gerrig (1983; Experiment 2) reported, participants were more likely to interpret the eponymous noun phrases as intended when there were restricting cues in the vignettes. Younger adults were also more likely to use interpretation strategies involving the distance of the target item from the eponymous noun phrase when no restricting cues were present, showing that distance between target material and its coreferent provides contextual information critical to sense creation. Although young participants will use the available context to attempt to interpret the eponymous noun phrase in terms of a specific action, older people do not. They produced generalized interpretations, even in the presence of restricting cues. Although the young participants were most likely to produce the intended interpretation when the target action was at a distance of 1 sentence from the eponymous noun phrase, older people were most likely to generalize in that condition. Older people were not statistically more likely than the young to use nontarget actions as their interpretations, and in fact younger people had numerically higher proportions of nontarget interpretations in five out of six conditions. Thus, generalization appears to be the preferred interpretation of older people in this experiment. Taken together, the interpretation findings do not support a working memory capacity deficit hypothesis of sense creation. Older people would have been expected to produce more intended interpretations

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when the target actions were at a distance of 1 than a distance of 3 sentences from the eponymous noun phrase. There should also have been an increase in the proportion of generalizations when the salient action was at a distance of 3. Although the findings were predicted by the explicit memory deficit and semantic processing deficit models of aging, the Age 1 Distance interaction for intended interpretations may suggest alternative explanations for the results. One reason for the age differences could be that older people are unfamiliar with the sense creation task, and they may not have understood what was expected of them. As a result, they may have generalized because the instructions for the task were vague and there was no feedback on how to interpret the eponymous noun phrases. In Experiment 2, more specific instructions with examples were provided and feedback was given on the practice items. A second concern is that some of the contextual information in the vignettes may have confounded a working memory explanation with the other explanations. Perhaps the older people relied more heavily than the young on the vignettes’ opening statements summarizing the eponym’s characteristics, maintaining it in working memory rather than the specific actions, in order to compensate for a capacity deficit (Just & Carpenter, 1992). To rule out a working memory capacity hypothesis, in Experiment 2, we deleted the summary statements. This would eliminate any tendency for older people to hold generalized interpretations in working memory based on that material. It would also increase the relative importance of the specific actions in the vignettes as well as the restricting cues. Thus, with restricting cues, older people’s interpretations should be intended, like those of the young. When there are no restricting cues, we would expect more intended interpretations at a distance of 1, and more generalizations at a distance of 3. In Experiment 2, we also examined relationships between performance on a vocabu-

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lary test, listening span, and intended interpretations. Daneman and Green (1986) found positive correlations of listening span scores, assumed to reflect working memory capacity, and accuracy in defining unfamiliar words with complex meanings. Sternberg and Powell (1983) found positive relationships between vocabulary scores and accuracy in defining unusual words in sentential contexts. We expected to find negative correlations between age and working memory capacity and positive ones among working memory capacity, vocabulary, and the proportion of intended interpretations. However, neither listening span nor vocabulary correlated with interpretations for either age group, or across both groups, and so we will not discuss this analysis further. EXPERIMENT 2 Method Participants. Participants in Experiment 2 were from the same population as those in Experiment 1, but did not take part in that experiment. They were 31 young adults and 31 older adults. Means for age, health rating, educational attainment and vocabulary are shown in Table 1. Older participants had more education than younger ones, F(1,60) Å 10.49, but did not differ from the young in self-rated health, F(1,60) Å 3.61. In Experiment 2, a written version of the WAIS-R vocabulary test was administered. The last 20 items from the test were typed on a sheet of paper, with space provided to write in a definition next to each word. This test was used in Experiment 2 because it was a production measure of vocabulary and would be more comparable in demands to the interpretation task than the multiple-choice vocabulary test used in Experiment 1. Scoring followed the criteria published in the WAIS-R manual (Wechsler, 1981), for a maximum of 40 points. Older adults had reliably higher scores than the young (see Table 1), F(1,60) Å 7.18. Materials. The 48 vignettes for the sense creation task used in Experiment 1 were re-

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written so that the sentences describing the character in a general way (Elvis Edmunds is a really creative guy) were eliminated. Extensive instructions to show participants how to arrive at the intended interpretation were also written and presented to participants. Four practice items were given with feedback for responses. Finally, participants received a test booklet with the 48 vignettes typed in it, with space to write their interpretations. As in the previous experiment, half the vignettes ended with restricting cues about the intended action, and half did not, and these were counterbalanced. The distance of the intended action was also varied and counterbalanced as in Experiment 1. Participants completed the task at their own pace. Procedure and scoring. Participants were tested in groups of up to three people. After the individual differences tasks were administered, participants completed the sense creation task. All tasks were self-paced. Scoring for the interpretations in the sense creation task was identical to that in Experiment 1. Results Interpretations were analyzed as in Experiment 1, with repeated-measures MANOVAs, and separate analyses for intended, generalized, and nontarget responses. Results, seen in Table 3, showed similar patterns of findings as in the first experiment. Intended interpretations. There were effects of cue, with the intended interpretation more likely to be written with restricting (mean Å .626) than no restricting cues (mean Å .290), F1(1,60) Å 65.99; F2(1,45) Å 107.79. The main effect of distance was unstable: reliable across participants, multivariate F1(2,59) Å 3.90, but not items, F2 õ 1. The Cue 1 Distance interaction was not reliable in either analysis, both F1 and F2 õ 1. As in Experiment 1, there were age differences: Older adults were less likely to produce the intended interpretation than younger ones, F1(1,60) Å 9.23; F2(1,45) Å 29.07. The mean for older participants was .396 and for younger ones it was .521. Age marginally in-

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teracted with cuing in the participants analysis, F1(1,60) Å 3.36, p õ .07, but was reliable in the items analysis, F2(1,45) Å 8.99. The source of the interaction, according to Newman–Keuls simple effects tests, was that younger participants produced more intended interpretations when restricting cues were present (mean Å .726) than the old (mean Å .526), but the two groups did not differ when there were no restricting cues (mean for young Å .315, and for old Å .266). There were no interactions of Age 1 Distance in either analysis, both F1 and F2 õ 1, or any interactions of Age 1 Cue 1 Distance, F1 õ 1; F2(2,45) Å 1.65. Generalized interpretations. As in Experiment 1, participants were more likely to produce generalizations with no restricting (mean Å .527) than restricting cues (mean Å .297), F1(1,60) Å 34.32; F2(1,45) Å 93.81. Neither distance, with multivariate F1(2,59) Å 2.74; F2 õ 1, nor the Cue 1 Distance interaction, both F’s õ 1, were reliable. Older participants were more likely to produce generalizations (mean Å .475) than the young (mean Å .350), F1(1,60) Å 5.96; F2(1,45) Å 39.17. There were no interactions involving age: for Age 1 Cue, F1(1,60) Å 1.28; F2(1,45) Å 2.77, for Age 1 Distance, and Age 1 Cue 1 Distance, all F’s õ 1. Nontarget interpretations. In Experiment 1, approximately 8.5% of the 2592 responses were nontarget items from the vignettes, but in Experiment 2, approximately 11.3% of the 2976 responses involved nontarget interpretations. People were more likely to produce nontarget actions with no restricting cues, F1(1,60) Å 36.50; F2(1,45) Å 31.56, (mean Å .063 for restricting and .163 for no restricting cues). Distance was reliable, multivariate F1(2,59) Å 13.68; multivariate F2(2,45) Å 3.90. The univariate contrast of distance 1 with distance 3, F1(1,60) Å 24.92; F2(1,45) Å 8.67, showed that participants were more likely to use a nontarget action in their interpretations when the intended action was at a distance of 3 from the eponymous noun phrase (mean Å .150) compared to when its distance

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was 1 (mean Å .075). The Cue 1 Distance interaction was not reliable, both F’s õ 1. There were no age differences in the proportion of nontarget action interpretations, both F’s õ 1, but marginal Age 1 Cue interactions, F1(1,60) Å 3.48, p õ .07; F2(1,45) Å 3.75, p õ .06. Newman–Keuls simple effects tests showed that young participants produced more nontargets with no restricting cues (mean Å .187) than the old (mean Å .139), but when cues were restricting, there were no age differences (young mean Å .056; old Å .070). Age did not interact with distance, or with cue and distance, all F’s õ 1. Discussion The removal of the summary sentence from the vignettes in Experiment 2 and the extensive instructions reduced the distance effects seen in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, distance was a main effect across cue conditions only for nontarget statements. There were some minor changes in the patterns of interpretations across Experiments 1 and 2 for the young and older adults. However, the critical finding of Experiment 2 is that age differences in the production of generalizations under both restricting and no restricting cues remained reliable. A working memory deficit hypothesis would have predicted fewer generalizations and larger distance effects with no restricting cues for older than younger adults in Experiment 2 because of the changes in the materials and instructions. Thus, the results of this experiment did not support the working memory hypothesis. Although the results of Experiment 2 confirm the explicit memory and semantic processing deficit hypotheses, neither Experiment 1 nor Experiment 2 differentiates between them. If older adults’ greater tendency to generalize in sense creation is due to difficulty in retrieving the intended interpretation, then there should be no age differences in a verification task. Alternatively, if the problem is one of a semantic processing deficit, we would expect to find that older adults generalize regardless of the retrieval requirements in the

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task, because that is how they encode the interpretation. EXPERIMENT 3 In Experiment 3, we used a verification task and varied the interpretation cues. We had planned to investigate the effects of extending versus restricting cues. There were two reasons for this change in manipulations. First, the high level of generalizations in the no restricting cues condition of Experiments 1 and 2 led us to assume that intended verification with no restricting cues might be too difficult. Second, the purpose of the manipulation was to determine that if older adults encode a generalized interpretation of the eponymous noun phrases, they would not distinguish between the two types of cues for certain kinds of interpretations. Restricting cues were identical to those in the previous experiments. Extending cues involved generalizing the action to a related situation, such as doing an Elvis Edmunds to a piece of soap. We expected younger participants to be less accurate in verification with extending cues. However, the manipulation did not affect verification accuracy, and so data were collapsed across these conditions. Participants read vignettes as in Experiment 2, with the no restricting endings used in the previous experiments replaced with extending ones. After each vignette, one of four possible interpretations was given, and participants were to indicate whether they thought the interpretation was precise. Conditions for the interpretations were: Intended (Doing an Elvis Edmunds means carving fruit into exotic shapes), Generalization (Doing an Elvis Edmunds means being creative in a number of ways), Nontarget (Doing an Elvis Edmunds means building a table and chairs for your son), and Irrelevant (Doing an Elvis Edmunds means being a farmer in the Midwest). Compared to production, verification requires only recognition of the interpretation as precise. Thus, we would expect hit rates to be somewhat higher than production rates of intended interpretations. We would also expect young participants to be accurate in re-

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jecting generalizations as interpretations, but less accurate than in rejecting nontarget statements or unrelated ones, because generalizations encompass the intended interpretation more closely than nontargets or unrelated statements. If older people’s propensity to produce generalizations is due to a retrieval problem, we would expect their patterns of verification to follow younger people’s, because the verification task should eliminate the need to retrieve the interpretation. However, if they have a semantic processing deficit, we would expect an interaction of age with interpretation statement. Older people should not reject generalizations. They might be either as accurate or less accurate in verifying intended interpretations, compared to the young, because even if generalizations are what is encoded, intended interpretations would broadly match the generalization. Similarly, nontargets should be less likely to be rejected by older adults because they also match the generalized interpretation to a certain extent. However, older people should be as accurate as the young in rejecting unrelated interpretations, as they do not match the generalized interpretation. In Experiment 3, we also examined individual differences in tests of abstraction and reasoning to determine if the cognitive abilities measured by these psychometric tasks predicted verification performance independent of age. We hypothesized that abstraction and reasoning might be correlated with the rejection rate of generalizations. Sense creation does require both abstracting and applying the relationship between actions by the eponym and the contextual cues, as would be observed in a reasoning measure (see Sternberg, 1985). Older people have more difficulty with abstraction and rule application in inductive reasoning tasks than the young (Babcock, 1994). If abstraction and reasoning independent of age correlate with verification scores, the results would support the suggestion of Sternberg that derivation of meaning from context is related to basic intellectual abilities. If age independent of abstraction and reasoning correlates with verification, the results would sug-

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gest that aging is associated with some other factor that increases generalization. Method Participants. Participants were 26 young and 26 older adults. Young participants were USC undergraduates volunteering for extra credit, and the older ones were residents of a senior condominium community. Older participants were volunteers and the condominium improvement club to which they belonged was given $15.00 in the name of each participant. Data on these individuals are seen in the rightmost columns of Table 1. There were no age differences in years of formal education or self-rated health, F’s õ 1. Participants completed the vocabulary and reasoning subtests of the Shipley Institute of Living Scales (Shipley, 1940). We used the Shipley vocabulary test in this experiment because the experimental task is one of verification, which would more closely parallel a recognition vocabulary than a production vocabulary test. Participants also completed a written version of the WAIS-R Similarities test, which is considered a test of abstraction. In this task, participants are to identify what two objects have in common. There are 14 pairs of objects, and the base-level category to which the items belong is the correct answer. Scoring followed the instructions in the WAIS-R manual (Wechsler, 1981). Older adults had higher scores (seen in Table 1) on the vocabulary test, F(1,50) Å 41.90, reliably lower scores than the young on the reasoning test, (old mean Å 33.33; young mean Å 40.61), F(1,50) Å 9.03, and did not differ from the young on the written Similarities tests (old mean Å 20.71; young mean Å 20.65), F õ 1. Apparatus An IBM 386 clone with a color monitor was used to present the verification task. A Turbo-PASCAL program was written to present materials and to record and collect response times in milliseconds. Materials and Procedures Although in Experiment 2, instructions on how to complete the sense creation items were

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explicit, and participants had practice with feedback, it could be argued that the older people did not perform like the young because of a lack of familiarity with the materials, as they are fictitious and unusual. In Experiment 3, participants were given extensive practice in the interpretation task in several ways. After reviewing the practice materials from Experiment 2 explaining the task, participants completed a famous eponym version of the task. This task had two purposes: to assess age differences in sense creation with familiar names and to provide participants an opportunity to become better acquainted with the task. Participants read twelve vignettes about famous people like Richard Nixon and Zsa Zsa Gabor. As in the fictitious character vignettes, there were three actions associated with the eponym. All final sentences had restricting cues. Participants were asked to write their interpretations of the eponymous noun phrase. These were scored as in the previous experiments. Two example vignettes are found in the Appendix. Next, a typed description of the verification task was given, with examples of how to arrive at the intended interpretation and instructions to reject generalizations, nontarget statements, and unrelated statements. Participants next completed ten practice vignettes on the computer with three each of intended and generalized statements, and two each of nontarget and unrelated statements. An examiner pointed out errors in verification while participants were working on practice items. Errors were not recorded. For the experiment, which was next, participants were presented the experimental vignettes on the computer. They began each trial by pressing the space bar to present the paragraph, which appeared in its entirety. The vignette remained on the computer screen until the subject pressed the space bar for the verification sentence. Half the paragraphs had restricting endings, and half extending endings. Participants pressed yes or no keys in a timed verification task. There were 4 conditions crossed with cuing as described above, with six vignettes per condition (restricting vs ex-

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tending cues crossed with intended, generalization, nontarget, and irrelevant interpretations) and eight presentation orders for counterbalancing. However, because there were no systematic effects of cues on interpretations in this experiment, all data are collapsed over cues, so that each data point represents 12 observations per interpretation statement. Results Production tasks. Responses to the 12 vignettes with famous people and unique actions attributed to them were analyzed. Responses were scored as based on the intended interpretation (erasing incriminating evidence), on a generalization (being a politician), or based on a nontarget action (opening trade to China). There were few nontarget actions produced, so a repeated-measures analysis of variance focused on age differences in the proportions of interpretations produced: generalizations (.157 for old, .057 for young); and intended interpretations (.682 for old; .882 for young). Results showed a reliable Age 1 Response Type interaction, F(1,96) Å 14.41. Simple effects tests showed that older people were less likely to produce intended interpretations than the young and more likely to produce generalizations. Thus, once again, a production task, this one focusing on familiar eponyms, shows a greater tendency for older adults to generalize. However, a greater proportion of intended interpretations were produced by both age groups in this task than with the fictitious eponyms of Experiments 1 and 2. Despite no reliable age differences in the total score of the WAIS-R Similarities test, an analysis of incorrect responses also indicated some qualitative age differences. A judge naive to the hypotheses of this study determined whether the errors involved a higher-level category than the intended one, common features, or a failure to detect a relationship. For example, for the item on what a fly and a tree have in common, a higher-level category (the correct response is living things) would be creations of God. Common features would be a response like both have limbs. A failure to detect a relationship would be expressed by

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one is an insect, the other a plant. There were virtually none of these. Analysis of errors showed that older people were much more likely to use higher level categories than younger ones, (old mean proportion Å .267, young Å .074) and that younger ones were more likely to produce common features (old proportion Å .351; young Å .581), F(1,50) Å 16.77. Older adults’ errors on the written Similarities test involved abstracting information in a more general way than younger adults. Signal detection analyses. A repeated measures MANOVA with the factors of age and interpretation condition was used to analyze the verification scores and response latencies. Table 4 presents verification hit and correct rejection rates, d *, log betas, and verification times for the conditions of Experiment 3. Because the results for hits and d * are identical, we will present the signal detection analyses only. Univariate contrasts are reported following each reliable multivariate effect. Only analyses relevant to the age hypotheses are reported here. There was a reliable Age 1 Verification Item interaction, multivariate F1(3,48) Å 8.21; multivariate F2(3,45) Å 11.20. Simple effects contrasts showed that there were no age differences in d * for intended interpretations (see Table 4), F1 and F2 õ 1, but younger people had reliably higher d *s for generalized interpretations than old ones, F1(1,50) Å 23.65; F2(1,47) Å 30.07. For nontarget items, there were reliable age differences, F1(1,50) Å 29.43; F2(1,47) Å 51.92 but they are smaller than for generalizations. There were no age differences in d * for unrelated interpretations, F1(1,50) Å 1.03 for participants, but significant age differences for items, F2(1,47) Å 4.64, with smaller differences for this contrast than for other reliable age differences in d *. Analysis of response bias to items in each condition was conducted with log transformed betas and paralleled those of d *. Age interacted with interpretation statement, multivariate F1(3,48) Å 6.05; multivariate F2(3,45) Å 4.93. There were no age differ-

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702 (1114) (1298) (784) (720) 4802 5271 4879 4349 (982) (1112) (1024) (914) 3714 3397 3253 3191 (.183) (.102) (.697) (1.097) .096 .018 .241 1.076 (.513) (.635) (.899) (.717) .133 .328 .795 .699 (1.394) (1.185) (1.773) (2.062) 1.474 0.162 1.701 4.362

Old Young Old Old

Young

log beta

(1.158) (2.351) (2.103) (2.111)

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1.341 2.644 4.620 4.948 (.171) (.207) (.198) (.078) .688 .485 .738 .925 (.154) (.166) (.088) (.060) Intended Generalization Nontarget Unrelated

Young

.697 .780 .945 .956

Old

Young

d* Correct

Verification in Experiment 3 as a Function of Age and Interpretation Statement

TABLE 4

Verification time

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ences in log beta for intended interpretations (F1 õ 1) but the young were more cautious in rejecting generalized ones, F1(1,50) Å 6.27. For nontarget interpretations, the age difference is larger than for generalized ones, with young participants more cautious, F1(1,50) Å 6.22; F2(1,47) Å 8.55 for items. Finally, there were no differences between young and old on unrelated items, F1(1,50) Å 2.12; F2(1,47) Å 2.30. Response latency analyses. Response times for hits and correct rejections were trimmed to those within 3 SD’s of the subject’s performance, eliminating 4% of trials. Because the older adults’ rejection rates for generalizations were so low, these results should be interpreted with caution. The Age 1 Verification Item interaction was reliable for participants, multivariate F1(3,48) Å 5.03 but marginal for items, multivariate F2(3,44) Å 2.65, p õ .06. Because older people were always reliably slower than younger ones, simple effects contrasts focused on differences between conditions for each age group. Young people did not differ in latency for rejecting generalizations compared to verifying intended statements, F1(1,24) Å 3.38, p õ .08; F2 õ 1. The old were reliably faster in accepting intended interpretations compared to rejecting generalizations, F1(1,24) Å 4.48; F2(1,46) Å 7.08. There was no interaction of age with the contrast of nontarget versus intended and generalized statements for either participants, or items analyses, all F’s õ 1. The decrease in latency for unrelated items compared to all others was reliably greater for older, F1(1,24) Å 22.82; F2(1,46) Å 9.63 than younger adults, F1(1,25) Å 8.42; F2 Å 2.05, ns. Individual differences. In partial correlation analysis, d * for generalized statements was predicted from reasoning and Similarities scores, and chronological age. Effects of age were partialled to examine the relationship of the psychometric tests on verification of generalizations independent of age, and effects of reasoning and Similarities were partialled to examine the relationship of age with verification independent of abilities. Correlations were also computed separately for each age

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Age

Reasoning

Similarities

Generalization All participants Young participants Old participants

0.583*** — —

.431*** 0.105 .397*

.175 0.266 .521**

Reasoning All participants Young participants Old participants

0.445*** — —

— — —

.315* .483** .278

Similarities All participants Young participants Old participants

0.054 — —

— — —

— — —

Age with reasoning & similarities partialled

Reasoning with age partialled

0.491***

.235*

Similarities with age partialled

.176

.325**

—

Note. Generalization refers to rejection of generalizations as interpretations of the eponymous noun phrase in Experiment 3. * p õ .05. ** p õ .01. *** p õ .001.

group. Table 5 shows the results of the correlation analyses. The zero-order correlations for the pooled age groups show reliable relationships of age and reasoning with d * for generalizations, but not with Similarities. Older age and lower reasoning scores were associated with a greater tendency to generalize. However, separate age analyses revealed that this correlation was observed only in the older participants. Lower Similarities scores were correlated with lower generalization rejection rates in the older adults only. For the pooled sample, partialling age reduced correlations, but the relationship between reasoning and verification scores remained reliable. Partialling reasoning and Similarities, which were correlated .315, reduced the coefficient for age with generalizations but it remained significant. This suggests that age and reasoning both contribute to explaining the tendency to generalize. However, this relationship is restricted to the older adults. The absence of a relationship for the

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younger adults may be due to high correct rejection rates, high reasoning scores, and therefore a restriction in variance in that age group. It may also be an unstable relationship because of the small sample size for the individual age groups. The patterns of correlations for the older adults follow the predictions of a semantic processing deficit hypothesis, but should be interpreted with caution because of the small n. Discussion In the verification task, young participants were least cautious but only moderately accurate in accepting intended interpretations. Despite reducing the retrieval requirements of the task, interpretations are not therefore identified automatically. Young participants’ performance was better in rejecting generalizations and most accurate in rejecting nontarget or unrelated materials, and they were more cautious with these items than intended ones. However, it should be noted that the mean log betas are low, even in the nontarget and

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unrelated conditions, and because participants were at ceiling in those conditions, the betas simply reflect errorless performance. Latency data show that young people were somewhat faster to reject generalized statements than to accept intended ones and that they were fastest to reject unrelated materials, reflecting the relative ease of rejecting material that does not fit the intended interpretation. The absence of an age difference in verification of intended interpretations suggests that older people can identify the intended interpretation as such in sense creation when the retrieval requirements of the task are reduced. However, they have difficulties in rejecting the generalized interpretation, as evidenced in virtually zero d *s and very long latencies to reject those items. Older people also were less likely than the young to reject nontarget actions in the verification task. Taken together, these findings suggest that older people use a broad interpretation to arrive at the intended sense of an eponymous noun phrase in a task such as verification. These results are consonant with a semantic processing deficit hypothesis. If the problem had merely been one of retrieval in explicit memory, older adults would have shown a greater tendency to generalize their interpretations in the production tasks, but there would have been no age differences in patterns of verification. GENERAL DISCUSSION The three experiments show that older adults have deficits in sense creation. Sense creation involves understanding linguistic information in situations where existing representations are not helpful in assigning meaning. Instead, contextual information must be coordinated and integrated to derive the intended interpretation. Older adults are more likely than younger ones to use generalized interpretations in creating the sense of eponymous noun phrases. In Experiments 1 and 2, this occurred in a production task with fictitious characters. This pattern of findings was repeated in Experiment 3 when eponymous noun phrases using famous

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names were interpreted. It was also observed, surprisingly, in a standardized test involving comparison of similarities of objects where the appropriate answer is a base level category. In the verification task of Experiment 3, older adults did not differ from the young in verifying that intended interpretations were precise, but were less likely than the young to reject generalizations or nontarget interpretations. Sense creation involves the initial steps in learning semantic associations, and several theories of why older adults have difficulties in this process were tested. The production findings can be predicted either by an explicit memory deficit or a semantic processing deficit. The main difference between these two models is the point at which the deficit occurs. An explicit memory deficit would predict difficulties at retrieval in producing the appropriate interpretation, leading to a nonspecific interpretation. A verification task should eliminate age differences if retrieval is the locus of the problem for older adults. A semantic processing deficit would predict that the problem arises at encoding, where older adults are encoding general aspects of the information and ignoring specific contextual elements of the material. The prediction here would be that in a verification task, in which retrieval demands are minimized, older people would correctly verify intended interpretations, but be very poor at rejecting generalizations. This is what was found. Clark and Gerrig’s (1983) model of sense creation, involving identifying relevant material, and selecting the intended interpretation, assumes an integration of information from world knowledge with contextual material. We found no evidence that older people had difficulties with the pragmatics of the task. Older people were as sensitive to context cues as younger people in all three experiments. The older people appeared to understand the requirements of the interpretation task, as results did not differ even with the inclusion of extensive instructions for interpretation in Experiments 2 and 3. If

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practice was necessary for older people to master the task, we might have observed changes in interpretations across trials. A comparison of responses from the first 24 vignettes with those from the second 24 in Experiments 1 and 2 showed no differences in proportion of types of interpretations across age groups. Unfamiliarity with the linguistic construction of the eponymous noun phrases did not appear to be a problem, as performance was similar with fictitious and real eponyms. The difficulty older people had with the task was in matching the eponymous noun phrase to specific actions rather than a general interpretation, the final step of the sense creation process as conceptualized by Clark and Gerrig (1983). This difficulty was predicted not only by age but by reasoning ability, which was also correlated with age in Experiment 3. As suggested by Sternberg and colleagues (see Sternberg, 1985), reasoning may be an important part of the creation of meaning from context, which in turn is an important source of verbal abilities. In this study, the relationship between reasoning and rejection of generalizations was significant for the old but not the young participants. For the old, rejection of generalizations as the intended interpretation may correlate with reasoning because of a common set of underlying processes in both tasks. The reasoning test used in this study involves series completion, which requires that the basic rule of the series be abstracted and then applied to the items in the series to identify the next item. Encoding the intended interpretation requires that the ‘‘rule’’ matching the contextual information with knowledge be abstracted and then applied to the context to identify a specific interpretation. Rejecting generalizations as imprecise requires matching the intended interpretation to the generalization and determining that there are some common features, but not enough overlap across features to represent the intended interpretation. The results of the three experiments do not support a working memory deficit expla-

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nation of the age differences. Older participants were not more likely to rely on distance between the intended action and the eponymous noun phrase in their interpretations. There were no changes in the pattern of age differences in generalizations, even when summaries in the passages were eliminated to alter information in working memory in Experiment 2. The findings suggest that older people encode new semantic associations differently than younger ones. Models of how people create associative relationships in deriving meaning, based on young adults’ data, suggest that they match the unfamiliar concept to representations of the context and related information from long-term memory. Creation of meaning is based on comparison processes involving similarities between the concept and existing representations, with greater similarities increasing the likelihood of identifying meaning (Sternberg, 1985). Although older people appear to identify similarities in patterns similar to those of the young, they may be less sensitive to differences between the new concept and existing representations. This could explain why they tend to overabstract in the sense creation task. The results point to a semantic processing deficit of the kind first described by Craik and his colleagues (e.g., Craik & Byrd, 1982), who claimed that older people encode information in a general way rather than with specific associative connections. If it is the case that older adults process at a more abstract level than younger ones because of a semantic processing deficit, it would be important to know the extent to which difficulties in identifying differences across concepts would affect performance in a variety of tasks. For example, difficulties in many aspects of explicit memory, including source memory and word-finding, could be traced to deficits in specifying details of retrieved information. Yet, Craik has indicated that the evidence for this deficit is not overwhelming, especially in the memory literature (see Craik & Jennings, 1992). Most studies arguing against a semantic processing deficit

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do not use materials in which sense must be created (e.g., Zelinski & Miura, 1988). It is possible that evidence for a semantic processing deficit only becomes obvious in situations where interpretations must be derived almost exclusively from context. This would explain why the encoding of new associations is a problem in older adults (see, e.g., Light et al., 1995). To the extent that new associations must be encoded, as in the creation of sense or of new concepts, older adults will show impairments suggestive of an ability to abstract the relevant concept but not to differentiate it from related information. Age changes in abstractness in derivation of meaning from discourse context have been observed elsewhere (LabouvieVief, 1990; Dixon & Backman, 1994), but have been interpreted as a tendency for older adults to synthesize meaning. Labouvie-Vief has considered this a sign of ‘‘wisdom,’’ the ability to abstract higher-level meaning from specific information (see also Adams, 1991). Dixon and Backman (1994) have suggested that generalization is due to expertise with language, by which specific information is lost and only abstracted information is encoded. However, we would like to point out that experts can make errors because they do not encode specifics of situations (e.g., Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1991), and for older adults, a tendency to generalize can lead to errors in interpretation. These findings would suggest that for older adults, the creation of sense may cause special problems, leading to difficulties in understanding in situations where application of abstract concepts to specific information is especially important. Perhaps, given memory deficits in general, older people use similarities rather than similarities and differences in defining new concepts because this reduces the memory load at retrieval. However, it is too early to speculate about the mechanisms and the extent of overabstraction in older people’s development of new associations, without corroborative findings from other experimental tasks, including the formation of new

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conceptual categories and other conceptual combinations. APPENDIX Samples of Famous Eponym Vignettes Used in Experiment 3 Imagine that your friend is discussing Richard Nixon with you. Nixon liked to hold his hands up in a victory sign at speeches. He opened up trade with China. He was accused of erasing 18 minutes of a tape with incriminating evidence about Watergate. Later your friend tells you that she recorded some potentially damaging information and did a Richard Nixon to the tapes. Doing a Richard Nixon means? Imagine that your niece is discussing Zsa Zsa Gabor with you. Zsa Zsa was a beauty queen in her youth. She has been married to and then divorced from a long string of husbands. She slapped a police officer who had given her a speeding ticket. Later your niece tells you that when she got cited for a traffic violation, she did a Zsa Zsa Gabor to the cop. Doing a Zsa Zsa Gabor means? REFERENCES ADAMS, C. (1991). Qualitative age differences in memory for text: A life-span developmental perspective. Psychology and Aging, 6, 323–336. ANDERSON, R. C. (1990). Inferences about word meaning. In A. C. Graesser & G. H. Bower (Eds.), The psychology of learning and motivation, Vol. 25 (pp. 1– 33). San Diego. Academic Press. BABCOCK, R. (1994). Analysis of adult age differences on the Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices Test. Psychology and Aging, 9, 303–314. BURKE, D. M., & HARROLD, R. M. (1988). Automatic and effortful semantic processes in old age: Experimental and naturalistic approaches. In L. L. Light & D. M. Burke (Eds.), Language, memory, and aging (pp. 100–116). New York: Cambridge Univ. Press. CLARK, H. H. (1983). Making sense of nonce sense. In G. B. Flores d’Arcais & R. Jarvella (Eds.), The process of understanding language (pp. 297–331). New York: Wiley. CLARK, H. H., & GERRIG, R. (1983). Understanding old words with new meanings. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 22, 591–608. CRAIK, F. I. M., & BYRD, M. (1982). Aging and cognitive deficits: The role of attentional resources. In F. I. M. Craik & S. Trehub (Eds.), Aging and cognitive processes (pp. 191–211). New York: Plenum.

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