Effects of aging and text-stimulus quality on the word-frequency effect during Chinese reading.

Abstract

Age-related reading difficulty is well established for alphabetic languages. Compared to young adults (18-30 years), older adults (65+ years) read more slowly, make more and longer fixations, make more regressions, and produce larger word-frequency effects. However, whether similar effects are observed for nonalphabetic languages like Chinese remains to be determined. In particular, recent research has suggested Chinese readers experience age-related reading difficulty but do not produce age differences in the word-frequency effect. This might represent an important qualitative difference in aging effects, so we investigated this further by presenting young and older adult Chinese readers with sentences that included high- or low-frequency target words. Additionally, to test theories that suggest reductions in text-stimulus quality differentially affect lexical processing by adult age groups, we presented either the target words (Experiment 1) or all characters in sentences (Experiment 2) normally or with stimulus quality reduced. Analyses based on mean eye-movement parameters and distributional analyses of fixation times for target words showed typical age-related reading difficulty. We also observed age differences in the word-frequency effect, predominantly in the tails of fixation-time distributions, consistent with an aging effect on the processing of high- and low-frequency words. Reducing stimulus quality disrupted eye movements more for the older readers, but the influence of stimulus quality on the word-frequency effect did not differ across age groups. This suggests Chinese older readers' lexical processing is resilient to reductions in stimulus quality, perhaps due to greater experience recognizing words from impoverished visual input. (PsycINFO Database Record

Effects of Normative Aging on Eye Movements during Reading

“…However, the effects show clearly that older readers experience considerably greater reading difficulty. Compared to young adults, they read much more slowly (often almost twice as slow) and make more and longer fixations and regressions [154,155,158,160,161]. However, by contrast with evidence from alphabetic languages, there is no indication that older Chinese readers use a more risky reading strategy to compensate for this slower reading.…”

“…Despite these differences, research suggests the same fundamental variables are important in determining when and where the eyes move in Chinese reading. In particular, research with young adults shows that, as with alphabetic languages, reading times are faster and skipping rates higher for words that are shorter (and so composed of fewer characters), of higher frequency, or more predictable from context [150][151][152][153][154][155][156][157][158]. This suggests cross-linguistic similarity in basic mechanisms of eye movement control.…”

“…Studies that have examined aging effects on eye movements in Chinese reading also show that word frequency effects are larger for older than younger adults, suggesting that, as with alphabetic languages, older readers are slower to recognize words [154,155]. Others show that the visual complexity of Chinese characters has a larger effect on reading times by older adults than younger adults [159,162], indicating that this may be an important source of age-related reading difficulty.…”

Interaction effects of aging, word frequency, and predictability on saccade length in Chinese reading

“…Even so, researchers have observed a similar difference in eye movement behaviors between young and older readers of Chinese; that is, studies have consistently revealed that older Chinese readers fixate on target words for a longer time than their younger counterparts (Zang et al, 2016). Wang and her collaborators replicated larger frequency and predictability effects on fixation time measures for older readers of Chinese when they read two-character-words than for their young counterparts (Wang et al, 2018a;Wang et al, 2018b;Zhao et al, 2019). However, there were still distinctions based on impact of age on eye movement control between readers of Chinese and alphabetic languages; this implies that older English adult readers demonstrate longer forward eye movements, and skip words more often than their younger counterparts (see, Rayner et al, 2006;Rayner, 2009), although, recent evidence has revealed that there is no difference between the two age groups in terms of skipping rate and saccade length (Choi et al, 2017).…”

“…However, there were still distinctions based on impact of age on eye movement control between readers of Chinese and alphabetic languages; this implies that older English adult readers demonstrate longer forward eye movements, and skip words more often than their younger counterparts (see, Rayner et al, 2006;Rayner, 2009), although, recent evidence has revealed that there is no difference between the two age groups in terms of skipping rate and saccade length (Choi et al, 2017). Growing evidence on the topic of Chinese reading has indicated that older readers make shorter forward saccades and skip words more infrequently than young adult readers (Wang et al, 2018a;Wang et al, 2018b;Zang et al, 2016;Li et al, 2018). Thus, it seems that older Chinese readers employ a more careful strategy for eye movements, as compared to older readers of alphabetic texts.…”