Effects of word frequency and visual complexity on eye movements of young and older Chinese readers

Abstract

Research using alphabetic languages shows that, compared to young adults, older adults employ a risky reading strategy in which they are more likely to guess word identities and skip words to compensate for their slower processing of text. However, little is known about how ageing affects reading behaviour for naturally unspaced, logographic languages like Chinese. Accordingly, to assess the generality of age-related changes in reading strategy across different writing systems we undertook an eye movement investigation of adult age differences in Chinese reading. Participants read sentences containing a target word (a single Chinese character) that had a high or low frequency of usage and was constructed from either few or many character strokes, and so either visually simple or complex. Frequency and complexity produced similar patterns of influence for both age groups on skipping rates and fixation times for target words. Both groups therefore demonstrated sensitivity to these manipulations. But compared to the young adults, the older adults made more and longer fixations and more forward and backward eye movements overall. They also fixated the target words for longer, especially when these were visually complex. Crucially, the older adults skipped words less and made shorter progressive saccades. Therefore, in contrast with findings for alphabetic languages, older Chinese readers appear to use a careful reading strategy according to which they move their eyes cautiously along lines of text and skip words infrequently. We propose they use this more careful reading strategy to compensate for increased difficulty processing word boundaries in Chinese.

Effects of adults aging on word encoding in reading Chinese: evidence from disappearing text

“…This adds to the growing evidence that old readers suffer from greater reading difficulties (Kemper, Crow & Kemtes, 2004; Kliegl et al, 2004; Stine-Morrow, Miller & Herzog, 2006; Rayner et al, 2006; Rayner, Castelhano & Yang, 2009; Laubrock, Kliegl & Engbert, 2006). We also found some age changes that are specific of Chinese, that is, compared to reading alphabetic languages such as English and German, old adults reading Chinese employ a more cautious eye movement strategy (i.e., they skip words less frequently), which is consistent with previous studies (Liu et al, 2015; Wang et al, 2016; Zang et al, 2016). These researchers proposed that increased difficulty in processing word boundary in the preview phase with age causes older adult readers to use a more careful reading strategy to compensate for this difficulty.…”

“…Comparing the old adults’ reading time measure in Experiment 1 to that in Experiment 2 confirmed that the disappearing onset of word n  + 1 interrupted reading more seriously than the same disappearing onset of word n, which meant that old adults needed more time to encode word n  + 1 compared to word n. Old adults’ reading suffered more when they encoded the text of word n  + 1 than when they encoded the fixated text, which confirmed that Chinese readers may rely more heavily on the preview process than English readers. Previous studies claimed that old people have difficulty segmenting words in the preview phase, which leads them to adopt a more careful reading strategy (Wang et al, 2016; Zang et al, 2016). Although the results of the present experiments do not refute this deduction, it can be concluded that the lower efficiency in encoding the characters of the previewed word was also an important contributor to the more cautious eye movement strategy adopted by old adults, which was a specific age change in reading Chinese.…”

“…Only one study using the disappearing text paradigm was found—in which visual information of the fixated word necessary for sentence comprehension can be acquired within the initial 50–60 ms for young adult readers of Chinese—which indicated that they could encapsulate the fixated visual word information as quickly as young adult readers of English (Liu, Zhang & Zhao, 2011). Although researchers have investigated whether word difficulty factors (e.g., usage and visual complexity) affected young and old adults differently (Wang et al, 2016; Zang et al, 2016), there has been no study, as far as we know, that manipulated the exposure time of words to directly examine the aging effect on Chinese visual word encoding in reading.…”

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.…”