According to their own reports and to clinical and laboratory tests, as people grow older they often experience difficulties in understanding and remembering spoken and written language. Some of these communication problems are due to sensory deficits, but some complaints that are attributed to sensory loss are likely due to cognitive deficits. Even when people of different ages are equated on peripheral sensory loss (via an audiometric examination), elderly people are still poorer than the young at identifying spoken speech (Hayes, 1981). Furthermore, self-assessments of hearing impairment are not predicted well by the degree of peripheral hearing loss. For example, Weinstein and Ventry (1983) found that an audiometric evaluation accounted for less than 50% of the variance in self-assessed hearing handicap. This discrepancy may be due in part to the fact that the self-assessment of hearing handicap is sensitive to cognitive difficulties, whereas the audiometric evaluation is not. One of the goals of this chapter is to suggest specific cognitive deficits that might underlie these age-related communication difficulties.

Despite the increase in communication and memory problems, normal aging does not bring with it a complete deterioration of memory and language. The losses, although annoying and sometimes frightening, are only rarely debilitating. Therefore, clinicians and researchers need to determine not only what is lost, but also what is saved. Differentiating age-sensitive from age-constant components of cognition provides a more accurate theoretical account of cognitive aging.