Seventy-six female subjects, 38 young and 38 old, were tested for word recognition and for word recall. Each word to be recognized was embedded in four other words on the test trial. Contrary to the findings of several prior studies, a significant age difference was found; the young group had superior recognition performance. The age difference in performance was attributed to the level of difficulty of the task used here. Young subjects were superior to old on word recall, a finding in keeping with results of previous studies. Subjects in both age groups attained a greater proportion correct on a short list (24 words) than on a long list (60 words) on both recognition and recall tasks.