Language Learning

ISSN 0023-8333

Relearning in the Elderly: Age-Related Effects on the Size of Savings

Nienke van der Hoeven
University of Groningen

Kees de Bot
University of Groningen and University of the Free State, South Africa

This article reports on a study on learning new and relearning forgotten words of French as a foreign language in young (mean age 22.4), middle-aged (mean age 50.3), and elderly speakers (mean age 76.0). The three age groups performed similarly on relearning old words, but the younger learners were signicantly better at learning new words. Data from a questionnaire on contact with French and a working-memory test showed that neither diminished language contact nor age-related decline in working memory can be seen as single factors explaining differences between learning and relearning. The decline in older adults ability to learn new lexical information is discussed in terms of theories explaining age-related memory decits and conceived of as an age-related deciency to form associations between unrelated concepts. Keywords language attrition; relearning; vocabulary; aging; savings paradigm; French

Introduction Over the past few decades, there has been a vast amount of research on agerelated biological, psychological, and social changes that may affect human cognitive processes. Many older adults report a decline in one or more aspects of cognitive functioning, although the extent to which any such effects play

We want to thank the four Language Learning anonymous reviewers who evaluated this manuscript for their questions, feedback, and suggestions on previous versions of this work, and our colleague Mik van Es for his invaluable help and support with the statistical analyses. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Nienke van der Hoeven, Department of Applied Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen/Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, P.O. Box 716, 9700AS Groningen, The Netherlands. Internet: N.Hoeven.van. der-Houtzager@rug.nl

Language Learning 62:1, March 2012, pp. 4267 C 2012 Language Learning Research Club, University of Michigan DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9922.2011.00689.x

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a role differs from one individual to the other. According to Burke (1999), for elderly people aspects of language production, in particular word retrieval failures and occurrences of the tip of the tongue (TOT) phenomenon, tend to be their most serious cognitive problems. Research into age-related changes in language processing can therefore play an important role in the development of theory in cognitive aging (Burke & Shafto, 2008, p. 373). Interestingly, reduced lexical access, including TOT, is also common in both younger and older bilingual speakers (Bialystok, Craik, & Luk, 2008; Gollan & Silverberg, 2001), where it has been explained either as a result of the frequency lag (Gollan, Montoya, Cera, & Sandoval, 2008), that is, as a result of the fact that bilinguals use each of their languages less than monolinguals, or as a result of interference, that is, of competition from vocabulary items in the nontarget language, which interfere during the retrieval of words from the target language (Bialystok, 2009; Green, 1998). Many older peoples language problems are likely to be connected to an agerelated decline in certain memory functions, because memory is one of the main resources playing a role in the development of the language system (see de Bot & Makoni, 2005). Apart from the word-nding failures and the TOT phenomenon referred to above, there is, for instance, evidence that because of a decline in memory elderly speakers tend to use less complicated grammatical forms and syntactic structures (Kemper, 1992; Kynette & Kemper, 1986; Lintsen & de Bot, 1989). In our view, language, memory, and aging should be seen as closely interrelated concepts, so that studying one of them can improve insight into the other two as well. In this respect, the role of language has been twofold. In the rst place, in experimental studies, mainly in the eld of experimental psychology, language has often been the means by which potential age-related effects in certain memory functions, in particular working memory and episodic memory, have been studied. Second, the fairly recent interest in the phenomenon of language attrition has made language itself the object of research; in this case, the focus is on processes that are fundamentally related to memory functions, such as long-term retention and consolidation processes. This study aims to contribute knowledge that is relevant to these two elds by focusing on a question that is of interest to both: To what extent might memory processes that are implicated in two language functions, namely the memorization and retrieval of lexical information from an attrited second language (L2), be subject to age-related effects? More particularly, we will investigate if we can nd evidence for an age-related advantage in relearning old over learning new lexical information. From the perspective of language attrition, we want to see if and to what extent residual lexical information remains available after long
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periods of disuse, particularly in groups of elderly learners. Second, we hope that potential differences between age groups in either learning or relearning may provide us with better insights into memory-related processes, bearing in mind the suggestion by MacLeod (1988) that relearning may tell us a good deal about memory in broader terms (p. 209). Language, Memory, and Aging In an article on language, memory, and aging, MacKay and Abrams (1996) postulated three hypotheses that emerge from ndings in linguistic research, two of which we will focus on in this article. The rst one concerns the contrast between new versus old connections in the lexical network, addressing the observations that older adults exhibit differential decline in tasks that involve new versus old learning and that they require more time than young adults to form the new connections for representing novel combinations of words (pp. 251252). In the eld of experimental psychology, this observation was later expressed in the Associative Decit Hypothesis: A signicant cause of older adults decient memory performance is their difculty in merging different aspects of an episode into a cohesive unit. In a sense, the glue that links together the various aspects (attributes) of an episode is not as efcient in old age. As a result, although each of the components may be retained to a reasonable degree, the associations that tie the attributes-units to each other grow weaker in old age. (Naveh-Benjamin, 2000, p. 1185) Second, MacKay and Abrams (1996) propose the Distributed-Decits Hypothesis, which builds on the connectionist point of view (see, e.g., Anderson, 1983) that mental phenomena, such as memory and cognition, can be described as processes within interconnected networks of units, or nodes; according to this hypothesis, age-related processes cause these nodes or the connections between them to become generally defective, resulting in processing decits that are distributed throughout the information processing networks (p. 252). This hypothesis has been linked to a number of explanations for age-related memory decline that all point to the same set of underlying reasons: reduced speed of processing, reduced attentional capacity, smaller working-memory capacity, and defective inhibitory processing. Recent research in the elds of psychology and neuroscience has yielded ndings that deepen insights into cognitive processes. Without denying that agerelated differences in processing resources may cause differences in processing
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efciency, the approach toward cognitive aging has now become increasingly based on the assumption that age differences are specic to various memory structures or systems, and the research goal is therefore to determine whether the different systems are affected differently by aging (Smith, 1996, p. 243). Nowadays, the most widely accepted division of memory structures is the one by Squire (2004), who divided the long-term memory system into a declarative or conscious component, which comprises episodic memory (also called autobiographical memory, referring to conscious awareness of past events) and semantic memory (for world knowledge, i.e., for remembering information without recollection of the circumstances surrounding its learning), and a nondeclarative component (sometimes referred to as procedural memory) which is implicated in for instance procedural skills and habits, simple classical conditioning, and nonassociative learning. So far, a number of studies have investigated the extent to which the various memory systems are affected by aging. One of the most comprehensive ones is a cross-sectional study on distinctiveness and interrelationships among different memory systems in 345 adults by Park et al. (2002). They found that episodic memory, speed of processing, short-term memory, and working memory decline to a similar degree, whereas, interestingly, semantic memory showed an increase across the life span. Summarizing the most relevant research into age-related decits in declarative memory, Hoyer and Verhaeghen (2006) concluded that all cross-sectional studies of episodic memory have found considerable age-related effects, which reect weakly formed associations at encoding, conceptualized as age-related associative decits or binding decits, or the age-sensitive consequences of attentional demands at either encoding or retrieval (p. 215). This observation is in line with Naveh-Benjamins (2000) Associative Decit Hypothesis, as it points to the same underlying cognitive problem: the decline in older adults ability to form new associations between concepts. The ndings described above lead us, not surprisingly, to expect that younger participants will perform better on learning new lexical information than older learners. However, if we want to know to what extent lexical information from an attrited language remains available after long periods of disuse, we will not only have to address the issue of how well older learners memorize or retrieve lexical information, but also how, after successful memorization in the past, these lexical items were retained over a long period of time. For this concept, the process of consolidation is essential. The idea that fresh memories need time to stabilize is far from new: Consolidation theories already date from the end of the 19th century. Nowadays, neuroscientists distinguish between two types of consolidation processes (Dudai, 2004; Medina,
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Bekinschtein, Cammarota, & Izquierdo, 2008). Synaptic or cellular consolidation is accomplished within the rst minutes to hours after encoding or practice has nished. In this process, the hippocampus plays a crucial role. The second type, system consolidation, is what can follow synaptic consolidation; it is a slow process that can take months, years, or even decades and appears to result in a permanent memory trace in the neocortex. The above information illustrates how in fact the common division between short- and long-term memory is an oversimplication of what happens when a lexical item is memorized. It might also explain why after a long period of time lexical information becomes less sensitive to age-related effects. In this context of long-term retention of lexical knowledge, it is worth mentioning the study by Bahrick (1984). He investigated the attrition of Spanish as an L2 learned in school, in a cross-sectional study with 773 participants. One of the main contributions of his study to the eld of language attrition was that its focus of interest was a language learned through instruction, so that the participants language skills and knowledge were usually not as rmly established as in the case of a language acquired under naturalistic circumstances. Bahricks main conclusion was that: [a] portion of the knowledge acquired in Spanish classes is lost within a few years after training, but the remainder is immune to further losses for at least a quarter of a century, and much of that content survives for fty years or longer. (pp. 110111) However, because of the studys cross-sectional setup, the teaching methods used for older and younger participants may have differed. Moreover, in spite of Bahricks detailed listings of variables representing all types of language contact that his participants might have been subject to, the extent to which these variables play a role can never be precisely established. Relearning There are two reasons why applying the relearning paradigm to the eld of language, memory, and aging can contribute to our knowledge about both memory processes and language attrition. First, as it concerns an experiment, such as the one to be reported here, which reveals to what extent the participants have an advantage in relearning old over learning new lexical information, it will give an indication of how much is still left of seemingly forgotten words. The idea behind the relearning paradigm is that there is a certain depth to forgetting, and that as such it is a sensitive test that can detect knowledge
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that cannot be recognized by other memory tests. Second, an experiment with different age groups might provide even more insight into memory functions, as differences in either learning or relearning scores between age groups might imply an age-related development in the memory function(s) implicated in that particular task. Before reporting on our own experiment, we will give an overview of previous research involving the relearning paradigm. The relearning paradigm was introduced by 19th-century German psy chologist Hermann Ebbinghaus. In his 1885 book, Uber das Ged achtnis [On Memory], he reports on experiments in which the only participant, himself, memorized 169 lists of 13 nonsense syllables until he could reproduce them correctly. Next, after periods varying between 20 minutes and a month, he relearned a list he had learned previously and additionally learned a similar, new list of nonsense syllables. The relearning, which we will call a savings effect, reects the advantage of relearning old, forgotten words over new words, and in his experiment it was operationalized as the difference between the number of trials needed to learn a previously learned list and a new one. In the beginning, forgetting took place rather quickly, but the rate of forgetting decreased as a function of time. This observation led to the assumption that information, once it has been transferred to long-term memory, is never completely lost. A few decades later, Ebbinghauss relearning paradigm was used for a case study. In 1907 the Swiss psychiatrist Edouard Clapar` ede reported on a series of experiments he conducted on a 47-year-old patient with Korsakoff syndrome, who displayed the classical symptoms of the syndrome: she has retained all of her previous memories intact. She can [. . .] correctly name the capitals of Europe, but she does not know her whereabouts nor how long she has been there (Clapar` ede, 1907, cited in Nicolas, 1996, p. 1194). Following Ebbinghauss relearning paradigm, Clapar` ede administered a test on his patient in which she repeatedly had to memorize a number of words. Eventually, he found a learning advantage for old over new words that persisted even after 8 months. From this experiment and other evidence, he concluded that her unconscious or implicit memory was still (partly) intact, because she appeared to preserve some ability to acquire new procedural and semantic memories, although she could not consciously recall them. Not until the 1970s did a number of experimental psychologists give new impetus to research on the relearning paradigm. Nelson and colleagues (Nelson, 1971; Nelson & Rothbart, 1972) investigated the properties of the information stored in the memory trace and found that part of it is acoustic in nature. Nelson also concluded that relearning served a trace-strengthening function:
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The relearning trial resulted in an increased overall amount of memory strength, which would be sufcient for successful retrieval (Nelson, 1978). In two different studies, MacLeod investigated the relearning effect in the case of translation equivalents (1976) and savings for pictures and words (1988). Surprisingly, his experiments showed that savings was only detected by recall, and not by recognition tests, which made him conclude that relearning facilitates the retrieval of information, rather than (or perhaps in addition to) increasing its trace strength (MacLeod, 1988, p. 209). Savings in Language Attrition Research A decade ago, the savings paradigm was for the rst time applied to language attrition research. de Bot and Stoessel (2000) compared the learning scores on a Dutch language test of two participants, German adults who had spoken Dutch as children during a 4-year stay in the Netherlands, with those of a group of control subjects who had not been exposed to Dutch before. On average, the participants scored better on the relearning task than the control group. They also administered a within-subjects test, consisting of old words taken from the original Dutch list of high-frequency words and a number of Dutch low-frequency words. Both subjects appeared to have a signicant relearning advantage for old over new items, conrming that residual lexical knowledge was still present in memory. The study by de Bot and Stoessel was the rst of a series of studies of savings in vocabulary relearning of languages acquired under natural exposure. They are reviewed by Hansen, Umeda, and McKinney (2002), who also conducted their own study on language attrition and savings of Japanese and Korean as L2s. Investigating a large sample of 304 native speakers of English after their return to North America from a stay in Japan or Korea lasting from 18 to 36 months, Hansen et al. found a considerable savings effect. They suggested that subsequent research into relearning should address the question of which variables affect the size of savings, for instance, the original prociency in the attrited language and age. A study that focuses on the role of a potential variable is the one by Schneider, Healy, and Bourne (2002). In two experiments, they gave groups of non-French-speaking college students (64 students in the rst and 48 students in the second experiment) three trials of training on French-English vocabulary pairs and subsequently tested them on these pairs. In a second session 1 week later, participants were retested and then retrained on the same pairs, in both translation directions. The researchers found that the size of savings during relearning increased when during the rst session students had been trained in the more difcult
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English-French translation direction or had not been pretrained on French words. This made them propose that any manipulation that increases the difculty of [the conditions of] a learning task might reduce the loss across a retention interval (p. 439). More recently, research into savings was extended to the relearning of vocabulary of languages acquired under classroom conditions. de Bot, Martens, and Stoessel (2004) reported on a series of experiments in which they compared the learning scores of newly acquired L2 words versus words students of an L2 are likely to have acquired in the past. In all three tests, there appeared to be a signicant savings effect for the old over the new words. The last study involving the relearning paradigm that we want to mention here is an experiment by Bowers, Mattys, and Gage (2009), in which a group of 7 native English speakers tried to relearn the phonology of the language (Hindi or Zulu) they had learned in childhood and from which they had afterward been completely separated. At rst there was no evidence that the participants had retained any knowledge of their childhood language, but after some practice participants under 40 years of age appeared to have regained sensitivity to phoneme contrast in the language concerned. However, in participants over 40 years of age there were no signs of relearning. Likewise, young control participants who had not been exposed to Hindi or Zulu before showed no learning. The writers concluded that even when adults have not retained any explicit memory of their childhood language, they may still have preserved traces of implicit knowledge of that language. The Present Study In the experiment described in this article, we have again applied the relearning paradigm to the vocabulary of an L2 acquired originally under classroom conditions, investigating if and to what extent residual information remains available after long periods of disuse. In contrast to earlier experiments, groups of elderly learners are involved as well. Our main research question is whether the savings effect is age related or, in other words, how much different age groups differ in the advantage they have in learning old over new words. To assess this effect, we will operationalize savings as the score for old minus the score for new words and compare the mean values for savings between three different age groups (old, middle aged, and young), the hypothesis being that the differences between the groups will be signicant. We would like to emphasize that in our experiment the score for new words will function as a kind of control condition; basically, we might seem more
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interested in the question of how older and younger learners perform on the relearning task, but this study involves one more variable than earlier studies on savings, that is, age. Moreover, our (cross-sectional) setup implies that the three age groups differ not only in age, but also in the amount of time that has elapsed since they left secondary school, and possibly in other respects as well. Thus, in the interpretation of our results, the use and particularly the complexity of the extra variable, age, will require us to focus on the difference between the relearning and learning scores and also to analyze these different components separately in order to isolate the source of a potential difference in scores. Then, the reason why we have also included a group of middle-aged participants is that it will enable us to assess more accurately the extent to which potential differences in the size of savings between age groups are correlated with an expected age-related decline in working-memory capacity; after a rst decline starting around age 20 and a period of relative stability, a second decline typically sets in after middle age (see Park & Payer, 2006). Lastly, because we want to assess potential effects of intervening variables, we measure whether there is a signicant correlation between working memory, the vocabulary size score (i.e., the total amount of lexical knowledge that was found in the pretest to be still available for recognition), or the amount of contact with the attrited language and either the savings effect or the scores for old or new words. We also measure whether the scores for working memory, vocabulary size, and amount of language contact differ signicantly between the age groups. There are three reasons why French was chosen as the test language for this experiment. In the rst place, French was part of the Dutch curriculum during the years that the participants of the three age groups attended secondary school. Moreover, of the three foreign languages that are commonly taught at Dutch secondary schools, it is least often used in Dutch society and it is also perceived to bear the least resemblance to Dutch. The last two characteristics make it highly subject to attrition and thus suitable for a study into savings effects for lexical knowledge. Method Design The experiment consisted of two sessions with an interval of 2 weeks conducted by the rst author, who was the experimenter. The main purpose of the study was to assess the retention of lexical knowledge on the level of subthreshold memory. The rst session consisted of a pretest in which the amount of French lexical knowledge was measured (vocabulary size), a learning session, and a
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test of the words that had been memorized. Additionally, participants lled in a questionnaire on their language training and on contact with French. During the second session the same words were tested as in the rst session in order to measure how many words that had been learned or relearned in the rst session were still retained after 2 weeks. Additionally, a working-memory test was administered: The participants were asked to repeat backward number sequences, read out by the experimenter, of increasing length. A participants digital span was dened as the maximum number of digits he or she successfully managed to repeat backward two consecutive times. This backward digital span task has often been used to measure working memory, because, unlike simple forward span tasks, it is supposed to require participants not only to load, but also to process information (Park & Payer, 2006). Although Park et al. (2002) report that both the forward and backward digital span tend to be age insensitive, this observation is contradicted by numerous other ndings (Gr egoire & van der Linden, 1997; Hester, Kinsella, & Ong, 2004). Additionally, in a meta-analysis of 14 studies, Babcock and Salthouse (1990) found a greater age-related decline for backward than for forward digital span. Another reason why we opted for the backward digital span task was that we thought this test could be administered relatively easily and quickly and as such would not be too much of a strain for the elderly participants. All the participants were tested individually, in person, in their own homes. Participants Forty-ve subjects participated in this experiment, with an equal division over three age groups, that is: (a) 15 from the young group (referred to as group 1), 2030 years old (mean age = 22.4; SD = 2.2); (b) 15 from the middle-aged group (referred to as group 2), 4555 years old (mean age = 50.3; SD = 2.6); and (c) 15 from the elderly group (referred to as group 3), 7085 years old (mean age = 76.0; SD = 4.4). All the participants from the elderly group were still living independently and leading active social lives. None of them used medication which could be assumed to affect their mental capacities, and neither did any one show during either of the two test sessions any signs of cognitive decline. The participants were fairly equally divided over the two gender groups: From groups 2 and 3, 9 participants were female and 6 male, whereas from group 1, 10 participants were female and 5 male. All participants were native speakers of Dutch; none of them were language students or graduates, and none of them had lived in a French-speaking environment. As far as level of education is concerned, they had all successfully completed a higher form of Dutch education, with between 4 and 6 years of experience in learning
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French in a formal classroom setting. It was relatively difcult to nd younger participants with 4 years of experience in learning French, because, for the past 6 years in all but the schools serving college-bound students (known in the Netherlands as vwo, or voorbereidend wetenschappelijk onderwijs), French has been a mandatory subject only during the rst 3 years of the secondary-school curriculum. This also explains why on average the youngest group had a slightly higher level of secondary education than the older groups. All participants came from families with a middle to high socioeconomic status, with a fair division over the age groups. Because of the required 4 to 6 years of French tuition, the participants could not be selected at random, but instead were recruited from the experimenters personal social network. Materials The stimulus set consisted of 116 French words, either nouns or adjectives, taken from the vocabulary list compiled by Savard and Richards (1970), which forms the basis of the materials used for French language teaching at Dutch secondary schools. The words were divided over three lists. The rst list consisted of 60 highly frequent words that were assumed to have been included over the past 70 years or so in the basic vocabulary to be learned by any Dutch pupil during the rst years of high school. This assumption was not only based on the judgment of the experimenter, but also on that of an experienced teacher of French. Care was taken that the words did not have any clearly recognizable cognates in Dutch or in English because all the participants had some prociency in that language. The words on this rst list were randomly mixed with 20 French pseudo-words that had been checked on verisimilitude by a Dutch graduate of French. The total number of words, either real or pseudo French words, therefore amounted to 80. The second list consisted of 40 and the third list of 16 French words that were slightly lower on the frequency list than those on the rst list, but which could still be assumed to belong to the basic vocabulary to be learned by high-school students. Readers will nd the complete list of French words in Appendices S1 (real words) and S2 (pseudo-words) in the online Supporting Information. Next, for each participant an individual set of 40 cards was produced, 20 of them containing the rst 20 French words from the wordlist for which the participant had failed to produce the correct translation. On the back of the cards were the Dutch translations. The other 20 cards contained the pseudo-words from the rst list of the pretest, with a translation on the back, made up by the experimenter. The pseudo-words and their translations did not bear any obvious resemblance to existing French words. Just as during the pretest, the participants were not informed that these were pseudo-words. The
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reason why pseudo-words instead of low-frequency words were used is that it could not be taken for granted that all lower frequency words were completely unknown to all participants. The list of low-frequency words used by de Bot et al. (2004), for instance, contained a small number of words that were known to the experimenter and therefore possibly also to the participants. The reason why we did not test in a computerized setting is that this method was expected to present problems for some participants, in particular for elderly people who were not familiar with computers. As a result, they would have been at a disadvantage compared to participants from the younger age groups. Another issue concerns our decision to use a translation test in the pretest, in which we assessed if a word was forgotten or not. We are aware that this is not the most sensitive test of memory, but to make up for this, we set no time limit on this pretest, encouraged participants to guess, and accepted near translations. Moreover, we were concerned that the alternative, a recognition or a forced-choice test, might affect test results. Lastly, we assumed that this way of (pre)testing did not give one age group any advantage over the other two. Theoretically, it cannot be ruled out that this assumption was wrong, but there is no evidence from postexperiment interviews that in this respect there was a difference among the age groups. The questionnaire (see Appendix S3 in the online Supporting Information) contained questions regarding the participants secondary education, training, and grades in French; knowledge of additional Romance languages; and recent contacts with the French language, inquiring how often they (1) visited a French-speaking country; (2) spoke French; (3) read a French book, magazine, or newspaper; or (4) watched French lms or television programs. As regards knowledge of Romance languages, 10 participants from group 1 had been taught another Romance language (Latin, Spanish, or Italian), compared to 8 participants from group 2 and 6 from group 3. The answers to the four questions about language contact (see Appendix S3, questions 811) were evaluated (a answers yielding 0, b answers yielding 1, and c and d answers yielding 2 points) and incorporated in the variable language contact with eight levels, level 1 (0 points) indicating no recent contact and level 8 (8 points) indicating a maximum degree of contact. Procedure All the participants were tested by the experimenter in their own homes, individually and in person. The test language was Dutch. They were rst presented with a list of 60 French words, mixed with 20 pseudo-words, with the request to provide the Dutch translations of the words they still remembered. In this
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pretest they were encouraged to guess if they felt unsure about a translation, and there was no time limit. Next they lled in a questionnaire, while the experimenter listed which words were correct and selected the cards containing words for which no correct translation had been produced. If this number was lower than 20, the participant was presented with a second list, which contained 40 slightly less frequent words. If after they had lled this one in the total number of words they had not translated correctly was still below 20, they were presented with a third list of 16, still less frequent words. In all cases, this resulted in an individual list of 20 unrecognized French words for every participant. Finally, the cards with the 20 words that had not been recognized were mixed with the cards containing the pseudo-words, which had already been presented in the pretest. The participants were asked to study the words one by one and to memorize the Dutch translation on the back of the card for 8 seconds in total. After they had nished, they were asked to count backward from 100 by steps of 7. Next, they were asked to describe in detail how they traveled from their home to a public building at some distance, for instance, the central station. Finally, they were asked to count backward from 40 by steps of 3 and they were engaged in some conversation. These tasks were meant to distract the participants, so that they had to empty their working memory. After about 10 minutes, the cards were presented to them in a random order and they were asked to provide the translations. During the second session, 2 weeks later, each participant was presented with the same words that he/she had memorized in session 1, but in a new random order, and asked to provide the translations. Finally, at the end of the second session, the participants working memory was tested by means of the backward digital span task.

Results In this section, we report the descriptive statistics and inferential results of our experiment. Readers interested in the raw results for our main variables can nd the individual scores listed in Appendix S4 in the online Supporting Information. To answer our main research question, if the age groups differ in the advantage they have in learning old over new words, we present the average number of words remembered correctly, the savings effect (the scores for old minus new words), and standard deviations in Table 1. The scores over two sessions are plotted in Figure 1, and the scores for savings (scores for old minus new words) for the age groups, over 2 sessions, are plotted in Figure 2.
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Table 1 Average test scores (and standard deviations) per age group (N = 15 each) Age Group Session 1 Old words New words Savings effect Old words New words Savings effect 2030 yrs 12.9 (3.0) 7.1 (4.5) 5.8 (3.2) 11.0 (4.2) 4.4 (2.8) 6.6 (3.0) 4555 yrs 13.1 (3.9) 4.4 (4.5) 8.7 (3.8) 9.6 (4.3) 1.3 (1.8) 8.3 (3.8) 7085 yrs 12.4 (3.4) 2.9 (2.6) 9.5 (3.1) 10.9 (4.6) 1.1 (1.2) 9.9 (4.0)

Session 2

Note. Total maximum score possible was 20 for old words and 20 for new words.

Figure 1 Boxplot with scores for old and new/pseudo-words in two sessions, for three age groups.

We rst performed a repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) with age group (three levels) as the between-subjects factor and the scores on savings in sessions 1 and 2 as the within-subjects factor. Session had no signicant effect, F (2,42) = 0.22, p = .64. Neither was there a signicant
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Figure 2 Boxplot with scores for savings (old minus new words) in sessions 1 and 2.

interaction effect of session with age group, F (2,42) = 0.51, p = .61. For the rest of our analyses we therefore used the mean values for savings over the two sessions. An ANOVA1 with age group (3 levels) as independent variable and the average score for the old minus the new words (i.e., savings) in sessions 1 and 2 as dependent variable showed that the age groups differed signicantly, F (2,42) = 5.03, p = .01, eta-squared = 0.19. Tukeys post hoc tests showed that the difference between the young and the elderly group was signicant (p = .01); the difference between the young and the middle-aged (p = .11) and between the middle-aged and the elderly (p = .55) was not signicant. To isolate the source of this effect, we performed one-way ANOVAs2 on the average word scores over the two sessions. For old words, the effect of age group was not signicant, F (2,42) = 0.09, p = .92. For the new or pseudo-words, the effect of age group was signicant, F (2,42) = 7.33; p = .00. Tukeys post hoc tests showed that the young group differed signicantly from the middle-aged (p = .02) and elderly groups (p = .00). The difference between the middle-aged and the elderly groups was not signicant (p = .68).
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Table 2 Average scores for working memory, vocabulary size, and language contact (and their standard deviations) per age group (N = 15 each) Age group 2030 years 4555 years 7085 years
a b

Working memorya 6.7 (1.0) 6.0 (1.0) 4.9 (0.8)

Vocabulary sizeb 24.1 (7.4) 40.5 (19.1) 64.5 (31.1)

Language contactc 1.5 (0.7) 2.2 (1.4) 2.4 (1.7)

Score on the backward digital span task, out of a total possible score of 10. Measured as number of real French words recognized on the pretest, out of 116 total. c Self-reported in the study questionnaire (see Appendix S3, questions 811), 0 = no recent contact, 8 = maximum degree of contact.

We also measured variables that could affect the scores on old or new words. The average scores per age group for working memory as measured in the backward digital span task, the average vocabulary size scores as measured in the pretest, and the average value for the level of recent French language contact are presented in Table 2. As regards working memory, a one-way ANOVA3 showed that the age groups differed signicantly in working memory scores, F (2, 42) = 13.63, p = .01; a Tukeys post hoc test showed that only the difference between the elderly group and the middle-aged group (p = .01) and between the elderly and the youngest group (p = .00) were signicant. Correlation tests revealed signicant positive correlations between working memory scores and the average score for old words (r = .47) and new or pseudo-words (r = .54), but not between working memory and the average score for savings, that is, the score for old minus new words (r = .01). In order to analyze whether the age groups differed signicantly in the scores on vocabulary size, we used a (nonparametric) Kruskal-Wallis test, because the Levene test showed that the variances across the age groups were not equal (p = .00). The difference between the age groups was signicant, H (2,42) = 13.56, p = .01; further Kruskal-Wallis tests showed that the vocabulary size of the youngest group was signicantly smaller than that of the two older groups (p = .00) and that of the oldest group signicantly larger than that of the two younger groups (p = .00). A correlation test showed that the correlation between vocabulary size and the average score for old words was signicant, r = 0.42, p < .01. A correlation test also revealed a signicant positive correlation between the scores for vocabulary size and the average score for savings (score for old minus new words), r = 0.51, p < .01 (Figure 3).
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Figure 3 Scatterplot showing the correlation between the vocabulary size score and the average score for old minus new words (savings).

As regards the variable indicating the amount of French language contact, an ANOVA4 showed that the differences between the age groups were not signicant (p = 0.15). Correlation tests revealed a signicant positive correlation between the scores for language contact and the scores for vocabulary size, r = .54, p < .01, but correlations between scores for language contact and scores for old words, new words, or savings were not signicant. Discussion The main focus of this study was to assess the relationship between the factor of age and the strength of the savings effect, that is, we addressed the question of whether there was a difference between three age groups in the advantage they might have in relearning old over learning new lexical information. We found
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that the difference between the elderly and the young group was signicant. These results conrm the hypothesis that the size of savings is age related: Older learners experience a greater advantage in relearning old over learning new words than younger learners. Isolating the source of this effect, we found that the three groups performance was very much similar in relearning old words, but that young learners were signicantly better at learning new words than older learners. In order to analyze whether potential differences between age groups in the advantage they have in relearning old over learning new lexical information might be caused by interfering effects from other variables, we also measured the three additional factors of working memory, vocabulary size (i.e., the total amount of words recognized in the pretest), and the amount of target language contact. As regards language contact, we found that the difference between the age groups was not signicant. Still, we found a signicant positive correlation between language contact and vocabulary size. The correlation between vocabulary size and the scores for old words and savings (i.e., the score for old minus the score for new words) may be (partly) mediated by the correlation between language contact and vocabulary size. However, it is notoriously difcult to achieve a valid measurement of language contact, which is a complex construct (Li, Sepanski, & Zhao, 2006). In the rst place, participants sometimes appeared to interpret questions regarding language contact differently. Second, even if a participant regularly went to France, it appeared that this did not necessarily mean that he or she regularly spoke French; for instance, particularly younger participants often reported on having stayed on French campgrounds without any signicant contact with the French language. Our test results for working memory are in line with ndings from the literature, in particular those from studies by Park et al. (2002), in that only the elderly differed signicantly, and negatively, from the younger groups. There was also a signicant positive correlation between working memory and the test scores for old and new words, but the correlation between working memory and savings, which reects the difference between the score for old minus the score for new words, was not signicant. Therefore, an age-related decline in working memory cannot be seen as the single explanatory factor for the age-related difference in the size of savings. This is in line with expectations, as this experiment addressed not only memorization, but also long-term retention of lexical knowledge. Still, working memory may play a mediating role in determining the strength of the savings effect. Our results for the variable vocabulary size, operationalized as the total number of words recognized in the pretest, appeared more interesting. Here,
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again, the elderly group differed signicantly from the middle-aged and young groups; somewhat surprisingly, the vocabulary size score of the elderly was higher than that of the other groups. The difference between the middle-aged and young groups was not signicant. There was also a signicant positive correlation between vocabulary size and the savings effect, suggesting a significant cohort effect of vocabulary size. Apparently, people with a large amount of lexical knowledge left nd it easier to relearn old words than people with less lexical knowledge left. The reason for this might be that people with large amounts of lexical knowledge have large lexical networks and consequently many potential links with seemingly forgotten words, thus improving the chance that on relearning a word will again be activated. Another point of discussion presents itself if we consider our ndings against the background of current work on bilingualism, particularly on the studies dealing with reduced lexical access in bilingual speakers mentioned in the introduction. The idea would be that the fact that the elderly participants have larger amounts of vocabulary knowledge left, and therefore retain larger lexical networks, might also have a negative impact on their ability to learn new words. In line with the interference account for reduced lexical retrieval in bilinguals, the additional lexical links in elderly peoples networks might thus cause interference for forming new associates, which might provide an alternative account for Naveh-Benjamins (2000) Associative Decit Hypothesis. We acknowledge that the cohort effect of vocabulary size that we found may be seen as a threat to the results of our study. Still, if we want to determine which factor causes the difference between the age groups, we should analyze in which respects the age groups differ from each other: in relearning old or in learning new words, or both. As we have seen, the different age groups perform very much the same in relearning, and the differences in savings are primarily caused by an age-related decline to learn new words. The group with signicantly higher vocabulary size scores than the other two, namely the elderly, also had the lowest scores for learning new words, and these were the scores that caused the difference in the size of savings. It is remarkable that, in spite of the variation in vocabulary size, all groups have surprisingly similar scores for relearning old words, while they differ in the scores for new words, which showed no correlation with vocabulary size. Of course, it can never be established with any certainty how much importance we must attach to this equality in the relearning scores (i.e., the scores for the old words) over the age groups. On the one hand, for the younger group the period of language tuition was much more recent, and the younger groups had signicantly higher scores on the working-memory test; on the other hand, the
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older groups had a larger vocabulary size, which put them at an advantage. It remains to be seen if taken together these factors resulted, more or less coincidentally, in equal scores for the age groups, or if, because all participants had to relearn old words at their own level, that is, taken from their own personal lists compiled after the pretest, they performed more or less equally in this respect. As we have seen, another remarkable outcome of our study was that vocabulary size seems to correlate positively with age. In this respect, the difference between the youngest group and the elderly group was so considerable, that we must conclude that after the end of formal education the average vocabulary size of the elderly, and probably that of the middle-aged group as well, was most likely larger than that of the youngest group, if we take it that after secondary education the amount of language contact was similar, which according to the results of our questionnaire seemed indeed to be the case. Still, the point is perhaps not primarily how often participants went to France, but rather that when in France, elderly and middle-aged learners probably made better use of opportunities to (re)activate and increase their lexical knowledge than the younger ones, because of their high prociency, which is based on a large vocabulary size at nishing school. This phenomenon is an example of the well known Matthew effect, according to which the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. The high vocabulary size scores of the older groups are also in line with ndings in the literature about the lack of age-related decline in verbal knowledge (i.e., semantic memory), reported for instance by Bahrick (1984); as we have seen, some studies, for instance the one by Park et al. (2002), even reported an increase for this factor across the life span. Moreover, also when considered in the light of consolidation theories (e.g., Medina et al., 2008), our ndings for vocabulary size are not as surprising as they might seem at rst. Even when lexical information has been transferred from working memory to long-term memory systems, nal consolidation or system consolidation may take months, years, or even decades. In this nal stage of consolidation, (re)activation of the existing memory trace seems essential. Although the approach of this study was quantitative, the fact that all participants were tested orally and individually makes it possible to present some anecdotal evidence regarding their learning strategies. Even though the participants were not aware that there were basically two different word types, they often seemed to use different strategies to memorize and retrieve the old (real) and the new (pseudo) words. Particularly elderly and middle-aged participants often remarked that they found it extremely difcult to memorize the new words, as they could not see any connection between them. Participants who
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indicated they had problems memorizing new words could not think of facilitating strategies. Only two elderly and three middle-aged participants seemed to consciously, and successfully, employ a strategy during word learning, namely forming associations between words by using mnemonic aids. Several younger participants appeared to use this strategy successfully. The main difference between younger and older participants using mnemonic strategies was that during the second session older participants had often forgotten the associations they had previously made between words and their translations; one of them even exclaimed where are my associations! Younger participants often remembered the associations from the rst session successfully. On the other hand, elderly and middle-aged participants indicated that memorizing and retrieving old words was much easier than memorizing new ones, because they just knew them, as the old words were still somewhere at the back of their minds, even if at rst sight the words were not familiar. Basically, relearning seemed to be a cognitively different task than learning, and for retrieving old versus new words the participants seemed to rely on different strategies. This difference between relearning and learning strategies was less clear for younger participants, who for both word types relied more on mnemonic aids. Last but not least, we would like to remark upon the fact that the youngest participants, who left school most recently, had by far the lowest vocabulary size scores. The disappointing results can partly be explained by the insignicant role of French in modern Dutch society. Yet, this situation was rather similar when the middle-aged group attended secondary school. The results might also be attributed to recent changes in the French curriculum in the Dutch school system. The amount of time spent on French has been drastically reduced. Moreover, teaching methods have changed. Nowadays, far less time is spent on memorizing words than in the past, when the emphasis in word learning was on repetition (for an overview of foreign language teaching methodology in the Netherlands, see Wilhelm, 1997). Of course, tuition in a foreign language involves much more than memorizing words. Still, the data from our experiment suggest at least a better retention for the older participants. Conclusion We would like to conclude based on the evidence we have presented that older learners experience a greater advantage in relearning old over learning new words than younger learners. Both quantitative ndings and anecdotal evidence from the experiment point to an age-related decline in the ability to
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learn new lexical information, which seems to be related to a decreased ability in older adults to form new associations between concepts. This observation is in line with ndings from the literature described in the background section of this paper, and particularly with the Associative Decit Hypothesis by NavehBenjamin (2000). For the ability to relearn lexical information we found that there was hardly any difference between the age groups. We hope that the paper has made it sufciently clear that the increased savings effect for older learners does not imply that they have any advantage over younger participants in their performance on the relearning task; the concept of savings has been dened as the advantage of relearning old over learning new words, and thus operationalized as the difference between the scores on the relearning and the learning (the control) task. The fact that for older learners this advantage is greater than for younger learners, because in spite of the decline in their ability to memorize new words, they perform similarly on relearning forgotten words, tells us something important about long-term retention of vocabulary. It suggests that an amount of lexical knowledge that is not forgotten soon after memorization is preserved or consolidated in long-term memory, where it becomes relatively insensitive or immune (cf. Bahrick, 1984) to further, agerelated loss. Although, as we found in the pretest, its traces may not be strong enough for recall or recognition, they can still be detected by means of the relearning paradigm. At the same time, the pretest showed that the older groups had a larger vocabulary size than the younger group, and this advantage might have facilitated the relearning process. The older groups probably had a large vocabulary size upon leaving secondary school, and this lexical knowledge was probably rmly consolidated in the years that followed, particularly when it was regularly activated. Finally, with respect to recommendations for further study, we must acknowledge that the age-related effect that we found was confused by a cohort effect for vocabulary size. This was partly caused by the studys cross-sectional design: The three age groups might have differed not only in terms of the interval between the testing and the participants secondary school period but also in the amount of language contact and the teaching methods in the attrited language. Perhaps in future studies such cohort effects can be limited by the use of a more longitudinal design. Still, we hope that this paper has shown convincingly that looking at age-related effects on relearning can help to provide useful, unique insights into memory processes. At the same time, future research into language attrition might benet from contributions by psychologists and neuroscientists, as better insights into cognitive functions may lead

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to a better understanding of processes of memorizing and retrieving lexical information.

Revised version accepted 1 February 2010

Notes
1 The Levene test for homogeneity of variance was not signicant: p = 0.47. The histogram appeared to be rather normal. 2 The Levene test for homogeneity of variance was not signicant: p = 0.15. The histogram appeared to be rather normal. 3 The Levene test for homogeneity of variance was not signicant: p = 0.50. The histogram appeared to be rather normal. 4 The Levene test for homogeneity of variance was not signicant: p = 0.07. The histogram appeared to be rather normal.

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Supporting Information Additional Supporting Information may be found in the online version of this article: Appendix S1. Real French Words.
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Appendix S2. Pseudo French Words. Appendix S3. Questionnaire. Appendix S4. Individual Test Results. Please note: Wiley-Blackwell are not responsible for the content or functionality of any supporting materials supplied by the authors. Any queries (other than missing material) should be directed to the corresponding author for the article.

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