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The present study is concerned with how young and elderly subjects read sentences which have to be immediately recalled. The task is a word-by-word self-paced reading task followed by a verbatim recall task. The study aims to test the hypothesis that elderly subjects would show a selective slowing of encoding processes (i.e., slowing more on certain parts of a sentence than on others) which would itself result from a reduction of working memory resources (Stine, 1990). The study also aims to test whether such a selective slowing might have an adaptative value in the sense that it could allow the elderly subjects to have a recall performance similar to the young subjects' one. The data show a clear selective slowing of the reading process in the elderly ; in addition, this slowing seems to be partly determined by the working memory of the subjects. The data show also that despite the slow down, elderly subjects have poorer recall performance than younger subjects. The pattern of reading times is further interpreted as indicating that the elderly subjects' specific problems arise from their trouble both in identifying the syntactic phrases and in opening new semantic structures.
