Older adults make greater use of word predictability in Chinese reading.

Abstract

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.

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

“…First, the results of the word-level measures analyses replicated those of previous studies, which state that older readers need more fixation time for comprehending text. However, we could not determine the effect of age on average saccade length, which is also consistent with the scope of the findings of a recent study by Zhao et al (2019). Second, with regards to the fixation time measures on target words, older readers fixated on these words for a longer time and re-fixated on them more often than younger readers, which also mirrors previous findings of studies on both Chinese and alphabetic text reading (Kliegl et al, 2004;Rayner et al, 2006;Rayner, 2009;Rayner, Castelhano & Yang, 2010;Kemper & McDowd, 2006;Kemper & Liu, 2007;Paterson, McGowan & Jordan, 2013a;Paterson, McGowan & Jordan, 2013b;Paterson, McGowan & Jordan, 2013c;McGowan et al, 2014;Zang et al, 2016;Wang et al, 2018a;Wang et al, 2018b).…”

“…However, contrary to what we had expected, we did not observe any significant differences in the average saccade length between the two age groups. As previous studies on effects of age on Chinese readers have also shown no differences in age groups in terms of saccade length, the our findings regarding sentence-level measures were consistent with previous research (Zhao et al, 2019;Li et al, 2018).…”

“…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).…”

Effects of Normative Aging on Eye Movements during Reading

“…A final consideration that also has received little attention to date concerns whether older Chinese readers make greater use of word predictability to offset the difficulties they experience. Only one study has been reported to date [161]. This showed word predictability has a larger facilitatory influence on reading times for older adults but no corresponding effect on word-skipping.…”

“…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.…”