Abstract
Successful word recall and memory encoding are complex processes which rely on a variety of factors such as contextual and syntactic cues. However, what happens if all or some of these cues are unavailable? In this thesis young and older adults were presented with three types of spoken materials (meaningful sentences, syntactic strings, and unstructured word lists). Young and older adults were asked to recall each sentence/word list as perfectly as possible. A moderate degree of time compression was also employed although there was no significant effect. In addition, this study examined participants’ pupil dilation while completing the study, as pupil dilation has been found to be an effective measure of cognitive effort. The study found that both young and older adults recalled meaningful sentences with the greatest accuracy, syntactic strings with the next best accuracy and unstructured word lists with the least accuracy. Young adults also recalled sentences/word lists differentially better than older adults. Young adults were also found to exert differentially less cognitive effort, as measured by pupillometry, on sentence/word list recall. The findings of this study have applications to the ways in which older and young adults process and remember speech, how they differ from one another, and the cognitive effort required to achieve this recall.