Eye movements of young and older adults during reading.

Abstract

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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