Finding the bigger picture: macro- (but not micro-) level features of the discourse reveal age-related differences in referential choice

A common-held belief, based on half a century of research, is that the domain of language remains relatively stable over the adult lifespan. However, emerging research in one particular area of language (pragmatics) suggests otherwise: there studies have found age-related decline due to cognitive, linguistic, and/or social factors. The current study adds to this growing body of work by examining referential choice in a large sample of adults (N=496 participants, ages 18-82) across four storytelling tasks involving 2-panel scenes where characters reappear in different contexts. We manipulated both macro-level features of the discourse (i.e., conceptual overlap and the relative frequency with which characters are mentioned across sentences), and micro-level features (i.e., referential complexity, indexed by the number/gender of characters in the scene). Based on findings from the language processing literature, we predicted that older adults’ documented difficulty in inhibiting irrelevant information from conceptually similar mental models (i.e., those involving the same characters) would result in an increased use of pronouns (due to familiarity effects). Our first three experiments provide evidence in favor of this prediction, while our fourth experiment found the opposite effect: younger adults used pronouns more than older adults. We attribute this to an additional manipulation in the final experiment: re-mentioning of the main character. While these macro-level features of the discourse revealed age-related differences, our micro-level manipulations did not, as younger and older adults adjusted their use of referential forms in similar ways according to the number/gender of characters in the scene.