The present study tested the generalizability of the adult age deficit commonly found for recognition of word content to the recognition of a nonsemantic attribute. The nonsemantic attribute consisted of the case format (upper versus lower) of words during their study list presentations. Elderly adults, as well as young adults, performed well above chance expectancy on the case recognition task. However, elderly adults, relative to young adults, were also found to have significantly lower recognition scores for case alone as well as for word content plus case. The age sensitivity found for case encoding emplies that this activity is not an automatic memory process. That is, it appears to be mediated by a cognitively effortful process.