Laurence Taconnat, Michel Isingrini
Two experiments examine the hypothesis that aging would influence a generation effect when the difficulty of the task is increased. We compared young and elderly subjects in three learning conditions : reading, easy generation and hard generation. In the first experiment, the target words were generated from a highly associated word context, whereas a low-association word context was used in the second experiment. The results show that elderly subjects do not benefit as much as the young ones from the advantage brought by the generation situation of target words on their reading, when the hard generation and the low association conditions are combined (experiment 2).