Karen M. Zabrucky - US grants

The purpose of this proposal is to study comprehension monitoring in young and old adults. In order to maintain good comprehension, readers must continuously evaluate their state of comprehension. If comprehension is judged inadequate, readers must select one or more regulation strategies to correct comprehension failures. Evaluation and regulation of comprehension require the complex mental operations of concurrent storage and processing of textual information. For these reasons, older adults may have difficulty evaluating and regulating comprehension, because of demands on specific components of working memory. We will use a new on-line research methodology developed in our laboratory to investigate evaluation and regulation in young and old adults. In Part I, we propose to examine the conditions under which the elderly have difficulty comprehending, exploring the role of subject, text, and task characteristics on evaluation and regulation of performance. We also identify the evaluation and regulation processes which may contribute to poor recall performance among the elderly. In Part II, we propose to identify younger and older adults who are skilled in evaluation performance and examine the specific evaluation and regulation processes used to maintain good comprehension. In Part III, we examine two aspects of comprehension monitoring skill in young and old adults by manipulating passage familiarity and exposure to strategies used by skilled readers. In this way, we will determine whether text familiarity and exposure to effective monitoring strategies can ameliorate comprehension deficits in older adults. Among our goals is to explore how comprehension monitoring strategies can be altered to the elderly readers best advantage.