Eye-Fixation Patterns of High- and Low-Span Young and Older Adults: Down the Garden Path and Back Again.

Kemper, Susan; Crow, Angela; Kemtes, Karen A.

doi:10.1037/0882-7974.19.1.157

Cited by 121 publications

(124 citation statements)

References 26 publications

(96 reference statements)

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“…Since first pass fixations were similar for young and older adults, this pattern of results suggest that age-associated working memory limitations do not affect the initial interpretation of the cleft object and object relative clause sentences but the ability of older readers to resolve temporary ambiguities and misanalyses arising from conflicting syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic cues (Traxler, et al, 2005). Kemper et al (2004) found age group and span group differences in regressions and total fixation durations for reduced relative clause sentences containing temporary ambiguities. The cleft sentences and relative clause sentences used in the present experiment were unambiguous.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 82%

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Eye movements of young and older adults during reading.

Kemper¹,

Liu²

2007

Psychology and Aging

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The eye movements of young and older adults were tracked as they read sentences varying in syntactic complexity. In Experiment 1, cleft object and object relative clause sentences were more difficult to process than cleft subject and subject relative clause sentences; however, older adults made many more regressions, resulting in increased regression path fixation times and total fixation times, than young adults while processing cleft object and object relative clause sentences. In Experiment 2, older adults experience more difficulty than young adults while reading cleft and relative clause sentences with temporary syntactic ambiguities created by deleting the "that" complementizers. Regression analyses indicated that readers with smaller working memories need more regressions and longer fixation times to process cleft object and object relative clause sentences. These results suggest that age-associated declines in working memory do affect syntactic processing. Caplan and Waters (1999) have argued that syntactic processing and other interpretive processes rely on a specialized processing system with a separate sentence-interpretation resource, unrelated to traditional span measures of working memory. The Caplan and Waters' theory (1999) predicts similar patterns of on-line processing for all readers since interpretive processes are buffered from individual differences in working memory. Waters and Caplan (1996, 1997) have directly examined the hypothesis that working memory limitations affect older adults' ability to process complex sentences. These studies have used the auditory moving windows paradigm (Ferreira, Henderson, Anes, Weeks, & McFarlane, 1996). This technique allows the listener to start and stop the presentation of sentence and permits the analysis of phrase-by-phrase listening times, analogous to visual moving windows paradigms which permit the analysis of word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase reading times. The studies by Caplan and Waters typically examine the processing of subject-and object-relative clause constructions, such as those below: Subject Relative Clause:The lawyer that knew the banker asked for a loan. Object Relative Clause:The lawyer that the banker knew asked for a loan.The subject relative clause construction imposes few processing demands on the reader or the listener: the subject of the main clause, the lawyer, is also the subject of the embedded relative clause. The object relative clause construction challenges the reader or listener to assign the correct syntactic relations: the subject of the main clause, the lawyer, must also be interpreted Address correspondence to: Susan Kemper Gerontology Center, 3090 Dole HDC 1000 Sunnyside Ave. University of Kansas Lawrence, KS 66045 Telephone: 785 864-4131 Email: SKEMPER@KU.EDU. Publisher's Disclaimer: The following manuscript is the final accepted manuscript. It has not been subjected to the final copyediting, fact-checking, and proofreading required for formal publication. It is not the definitive, publisher-authenticated v...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 82%

“…A recent study by Kemper, Crow, and Kemtes (2004) using eye-tracking methodology reexamined these issues. Eye-tracking is a naturalistic task that imposes few restrictions on readers; they are free to skip words or phrases, read ahead and glance backwards, and re-read entire segments.…”

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confidence: 99%

Eye movements of young and older adults during reading.

Kemper¹,

Liu²

2007

Psychology and Aging

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“…For example, older adults have specific difficulty processing words and the syntactic and discourse levels of analysis during reading, and these differences may reflect more general age-related changes in working memory and attention (e.g., Kemper et al, 2004;Rayner et al, 2006;Stine-Morrow, Soederberg Miller, & Hertzog, 2006), or the use of strategies that compensate for these losses to maintain good comprehension. Poorer reading performance by older adults may also be inspired by substantial changes in vision that occur as a result of normal aging, including loss of high-contrast near-vision acuity and reductions in spatial frequency sensitivity (see, e.g., Derefelt, Lennerstrand, & Lundh, 1979;Elliott, Yang, & Whitaker, 1995;Owsley, Sekuler, Aging and Coordination of Binocular Fixations 12 Siemsen, 1983; for a review, see Owsley, 2011).…”

Section: 2009)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Aging and the control of binocular fixations during reading.

Paterson¹,

McGowan

Jordan

2013

Psychology and Aging

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Older adults (65+ years) often have greater difficulty in reading than young adults (18-30 years). However, the extent to which this difficulty is attributable to impaired eye-movement control is uncertain. To address this issue, the alignment and location of the two eyes' fixations during reading were monitored for young and older adults. Older adults showed typical patterns of reading difficulty but the results revealed no age differences in the alignment or location of the two eyes' fixations. Thus, the difficulty older adults experience in reading is not related to oculomotor control, which appears to be preserved into older age.Key Words: Aging; Eye Movements; Reading Aging and Coordination of Binocular Fixations 3 When reading, the eyes move along each line of text in a sequence of saccadic movements separated by brief fixational pauses during which visual information is acquired from the page. Throughout each saccade, the two eyes move in the same direction and with roughly the same speed, although small differences in velocity can cause brief periods of disconjugacy (e.g., Collewijn, Erkelens, & Steinman, 1988a, 1988bFioravanti, Inchingolo, Pensiero, & Spanio, 1995), during which the rotation of the eyes, and therefore the direction of each eye's gaze, differs. It nevertheless has long been assumed that after each saccade, the resulting fixations of each eye are closely aligned so that efficient reading can take place.However, recent research shows that the locations fixated by the two eyes often differ substantially during each fixational pause (e.g., Kliegl, Nuthmann, & Engbert, 2006;Paterson, Jordan, & Kurtev, 2009; see also Kirkby, Webster, Blythe, & Liversedge, 2008). In particular, the two eyes typically fail to fixate the same character within a word on about 50% of fixational pauses, and misaligned fixations can be as much as two or more characters apart and may even be on different words.Moreover, misaligned fixations can be either crossed (when the right eye fixates to the left of the left eye's fixation), or uncrossed (when the right eye fixates to the right of the left eye's fixation), and the nature and extent of disparity may vary across fixational pauses.Fixation disparity is likely to be an important component of reading difficulty (e.g., Blythe, Liversedge, Joseph, White, Findlay, & Rayner, 2006;Kirkby, Blythe, Drieghe, & Liversedge, 2011) and appears to change as children mature into young adulthood (e.g., Fioravanti et al., 1995;Yang & Kapoula, 2003). For instance, the fixations of beginning readers (under 10 years of age) and child readers with developmental dyslexia are more likely to be misaligned, and to have greater disparity, than those of young (non-dyslexic) adult readers (e.g., Blythe et al., 2006;Kirkby et al., 2011). But major changes in the visual system continue into later adulthood through normal aging (e.g., Kerber, Ishiyama, & Baloh, 2005; Aging and Coordination of Binocular Fixations 4 for a review, see Owsley, 2011), and these changes appear to include a ...

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“…This conceptual frame, nevertheless, sets the stage for many points of disagreement on the particulars. Issues that are particularly controversial include (a) the processing mechanisms underlying lexical access and the instantiation of word meanings in particular contexts (Kambe, Rayner, & Duffy, 2001;Swinney, 1979), (b) the extent to which inferences are driven by attention to local or global coherence (Graesser, Singer, & Trabasso, 1994;McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992) (c) whether the availability of inferences reflect the automatic spread of activation or strategic integration (e.g., Long & Lea, 2005;van den Broek, Rapp, & Kendeou, 2005), and (d) more generally, the exact nature of the cognitive resources used to fuel computations (Caplan & Waters, 1999;DeDe, Caplan, Kemtes, & Waters, 2004;Just & Carpenter, 1992;Kemper, Crow, & Kemtes, 2004).…”

Section: The Nature Of Language Understanding From Written Textmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aging and self-regulated language processing.

Stine‐Morrow

Miller

Hertzog

2006

Psychological Bulletin

164

170

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This paper introduces an adult developmental model of self-regulated language processing (SRLP), in which the allocation policy with which a reader engages text is driven by declines in processing capacity, growth in knowledge-based processes, and age-related shifts in reading goals. Evidence is presented to show that the individual reader's allocation policy is consistent across time and across different types of text, can serve a compensatory function in relation to abilities, and is predictive of subsequent memory performance. As such, it is an important facet of language understanding and learning from text through the adult life span.

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Eye-Fixation Patterns of High- and Low-Span Young and Older Adults: Down the Garden Path and Back Again.

Cited by 121 publications

References 26 publications

Eye movements of young and older adults during reading.

Eye movements of young and older adults during reading.

Aging and the control of binocular fixations during reading.

Aging and self-regulated language processing.

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