The influence of foreign language and a word-color unitization strategy on the age-related associative deficit

Introduction: Older adults typically show a disproportionate decline in associative, relative to item, memory. Here, we investigated the role of stimulus presentation in a foreign language, as well as the impact of a unitization instruction for binding word-color pairs into a single unit, in this effect.Methods: Italian younger (n = 34) and healthy older (n = 17) adults completed a word–color associative recognition memory task in their native language and in German (foreign language) under two inten¬tional encoding conditions: Without strategy instruction and with an instruction to generate a mental image of the object in the associated color (unitization strategy).Results: The group of older adults, which overall reported high levels on cog¬nitive reserve (CR) proxies, showed no evidence of a relative associative deficit in their native language without strategy instruction. However, in the foreign language and with the unitization strategy instruction, an age-related associative deficit in older adults emerged. Hence, the older adults may have been able to compensate for associative binding challenges when task demands were rela¬tively low, but not when demands increased. When no strategy was instructed, there was a tendency for a stronger relative associative memory deficit in older, compared to young adults in the foreign language. However, this pattern disap¬peared in a comparison where young adults were matched to older adults in foreign language proficiency, and hence there was little evidence for a modu¬lation of the relative age-related associative memory deficit in older adults by language. A higher increase in associative memory performance was, then, found from the object-color unitization strategy for young than for older adults, effec¬tively increasing the age-related associative memory deficit. Across age groups, memory performance increased more by strategy use in the native than in the foreign language.Discussion: Together, these results improve our understanding of the con¬tribution of foreign language and unitization strategy instructions, to age-related associative memory decline.