From detail to gist in the wild: Linguistic markers of age-related memory shifts

In the lab, aging is associated with a shift in autobiographical memory from richly detailed, context-bound episodes to more schematic, gistlike representations, yet evidence from real-world and fine-grained adult-lifespan samples remains scarce. We analyze ≈365,000 German hotel reviews as naturalistic memory reports across adulthood and evaluate average word length as a theoretically grounded, scalable marker of linguistic abstraction (longer words = greater abstraction). We then test whether this marker increases with age, consistent with a shift in the expression of autobiographical memories away from perceptually grounded detail and toward more abstract, generalized (gistlike) representations. We find that average word length increases with age, driven by more nominalizations and fewer function words (a lexical pattern replicated in an independent English corpus, ∼1.4 M reviews; no age data), consistent with greater linguistic abstraction. Importantly, word length variation tracked ambient temperature during the stay (encoding) more than the review context (recall), indicating that the increase in word length with age is not just due to changes in linguistic style. Convergent validity via automated autobiographical interview coding of an English subset (n = 1,000) furthermore indicated that longer word reviews contained fewer internal and more external details. These findings establish average word length as a scalable, theoretically grounded marker of autobiographical abstraction, not merely linguistic style. They replicate laboratory findings in large-scale, naturalistic data and indicate that older adults express more gistlike memory representations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).