One group of normal elderly adults and two groups of cognitively impaired elderly adults were compared on an implicit and an explicit memory task. Degree of impairment affected explicit memory; the mildly and moderately impaired elderly adults demonstrated significantly reduced recognition performance. Degree of impairment also affected implicit memory priming performance, particularly for low frequency items, as measured by a word completion task. Explicit memory performance declined for both cognitively impaired groups, but implicit memory performance was sensitive to the degree or severity of impairment, causing a decline in performance only in the moderately impaired group.