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An influential account of normative aging effects on reading holds that older adults make greater use of contextual predictability to facilitate word identification. However, supporting evidence is scarce. Accordingly, we used measures of eye movements to experimentally investigate age differences in word predictability effects in Chinese reading, as this non-alphabetic language has characteristics that may promote such effects. Wordskipping rates were higher and reading times lower for more highly predictable words for both age groups. Effects of word predictability on word-skipping did not differ across the two adult age groups. However, word predictability effects in reading time measures sensitive to both lexical identification (i.e., gaze duration) and contextual integration (i.e., regression-path reading times) were larger for the older than younger adults. Our findings therefore reveal that older Chinese readers make greater use of a word's predictability to facilitate both its lexical identification and integration with the prior sentence context.

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Research suggests that pattern complexity (number of strokes) limits the visual span for Chinese characters, and that this may have important consequences for reading. With the present research, we investigated age differences in the visual span for Chinese characters by presenting trigrams of low, medium or high complexity at various locations relative to a central point to young (18–30 years) and older (60+ years) adults. A sentence reading task was used to assess their reading speed. The results showed that span size was smaller for high complexity stimuli compared to low and medium complexity stimuli for both age groups, replicating previous findings with young adult participants. Our results additionally showed that this influence of pattern complexity was greater for the older than younger adults, such that while there was little age difference in span size for low and medium complexity stimuli, span size for high complexity stimuli was almost halved in size for the older compared to the young adults. Finally, our results showed that span size correlated with sentence reading speed, confirming previous findings taken as evidence that the visual span imposes perceptual limits on reading speed. We discuss these findings in relation to age-related difficulty reading Chinese.

Substantial progress has been made in understanding the mostly detrimental effects of normative aging on eye movements during reading. This article provides a review of research on aging effects on eye movements during reading for different writing systems (i.e., alphabetic systems like English compared to non-alphabetic systems like Chinese), focused on appraising the importance of visual and cognitive factors, considering key methodological issues, and identifying vital questions that need to be addressed and topics for further investigation.