Memory serves many functions in the everyday transactions between the individual and the world. For example, we remember to stop at the grocery store, we remember where the grocery store is located, we remember how to drive an automobile in order to get to the grocery store, and, once there, we remember that we need to acquire the makings of a company meal scheduled for 2 days hence. These pieces of remembered information could be acquired in a number of ways, but in many everyday examples the remembered information is acquired through the processing of spoken or written language. We might, for example, hear or read instructions on how to drive a stick-shift automobile. The sequence of operations described in the verbal instructions would be stored and translated into a sequence of motor actions. Of course, the activity would not progress smoothly until such time as the motor actions became relatively automatic, but the initial representation of the activity could be acquired through spoken or written language. This chapter is concerned with the acquisition of information from written language (referred to as “prose” or “discourse”). The acquisition of information from spoken language is taken up in Chapter 13 by Stine, Wingfield, and Poon.

This chapter begins with a brief natural history of research in the area in which various kinds of studies intersect: discourse-processing, memory, and aging studies. Next, the current status in this research area is described, and the interpretation of current findings within existing models is outlined.

People differ in important and measurable ways along a number of dimensions of human functioning. The study of such individual differences has been undertaken traditionally by psychometricians, and their work has shaped current ideas concerning intelligence and personality. Other branches of psychology have been concerned also with the question of individual differences, but from a different point of view: namely, assuring through methods of control that these differences do not obscure or bias the results of experimental studies. Thus, the psychometrician finds error variance the focus of interest, whereas the experimental psychologist seeks to minimize it relative to treatment variance. The distinction between the two enterprises has been the nature of their respective goals: Psychometrics has concentrated on issues of measurement and structure of proposed dimensions of human difference, whereas experimental psychology has concentrated on general laws of behavior and processes that transcend the boundaries of the individual.

As more traditional views of experimental psychology have been replaced with the newer interests of cognitive psychology, however, there has been an increased interest in the interaction between basic cognitive characteristics of the individual and more complex aspects of cognitive performance. The work of Hunt and his colleagues on components of verbal ability (Hunt, 1978; Hunt, Lunneborg, & Lewis, 1975), for example, has generated a great deal of interest. The appearance of edited volumes devoted to the topic of individual differences in cognitive performance (e.g., Dillon & Schmeck, 1983) further attests to the growing importance of individual-difference concepts in current investigations of human cognition.