An observation of age-related asymmetry in the complexity of verbal mediator components

College-age and elderly subjects were required to give verbal mediators for consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) pairs varying in associability level, where associability was defined as the scaled likelihood of a CVC pair’s yielding a verbal mediator. The complexity of each elaboration of each of the components of the pairs was then determined to investigate potential differences in mediator formation between the two groups of subjects. In agreement with previous findings, the younger subjects tended to elaborate the stimulus term more than the response term. However, the elderly subjects elaborated the response term significantly more, and there was a trend for this to occur more with low-associability pairs.