Implicit speech act recognition reflects older adults' gist-based reasoning

Emerging findings suggest that older adults rely more on gist-based representations of an event's general meaning than on verbatim representations of surface details during decision making. This tendency is often attributed to age-related cognitive changes and accumulated life experience. However, the extent to which older adults rely on gist representations for pragmatic decision making based on linguistic information remains unclear. To address this gap, we used a recognition probe task to compare how older and younger adults' gist representations of general meaning influence pragmatic comprehension when interpreting implicit speech acts (ISAs), in which intentions are conveyed without an explicit performative verb. The task elicited automatic recognition of intentions from ISAs and involved conversations ending with a target remark conveying an ISA, such as "I couldn't have done it without you," followed by a probe word capturing the implied intention, for example, "thank." Participants judged whether the probe word had literally occurred in the final remark. We hypothesized that if participants automatically accessed the implied intention of ISAs, this gist activation would interfere with verbatim-based probe judgments, resulting in longer reaction times relative to a non-ISA control condition. The results from 34 younger (M = 21.8 years) and 34 older (M = 72.3 years) native Japanese speakers showed that older participants exhibited significantly longer reaction times in the ISA condition than in the control condition, whereas younger participants did not. These findings suggest that older adults demonstrate an advantage in gist-based processing, which may facilitate the interpretation of implicit pragmatic intentions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).