When presented with linguistic material, elderly adults are often unable to report as much material as are younger people. To ascertain whether elderly adults are as sensitive as young adults to the underlying structure of the to-be-remembered sentences, a study was conducted using the item recognition priming technique. In this technique, people attempt to remember sentences containing unassociated nouns. The subjects are asked to decide whether or not individual words occurred in the studied sentence. Thirty-six young (18-25 years) and 36 elderly (64-82 years) subjects were tested with a series of 288 item recognition trials consisting of 144 occurring nouns and 144 distractor nouns. When the primed trials were compared with the control trials, a significant and prime effect was found for young and elderly people with no significant differences between the age groups. The differences on paired-recognition of the nouns, a more traditional measure of memory, were significant with young subjects being correct for 83 percent of the trials and elderly subjects being correct for 72 percent of the trials. Elderly persons appeared to be less sensitive to the underlying propositional structure of the sentence than were younger subjects. Younger people showed more within-proposition than between-proposition priming, whereas the elderly subjects did not. Using tests of memory without awareness may give a more complete measure of memory across the lifespan than do traditional measures. (ABL)