In the domain of discourse processing, it has been claimed that older adults (60-0-year-olds) are less likely to encode and remember some kinds of information from texts than young adults. The experiment described here shows that they do make a particular kind of inference to the same extent that college-age adults do. The inferences examined were…

Speakers monitor their own speech and, when they discover problems, make repairs. In the proposal examined here, speakers also monitor addressees for understanding and, when necessary, alter their utterances in progress. Addressees cooperate by displaying and signaling their understanding in progress. Pairs of participants were videotaped as a…