Self-regulated reading in adulthood.

Abstract

Young and older adults read a series of passages of 3 different genres for an immediate assessment of text memory (measured by recall and true/false questions). Word-by-word reading times were measured and decomposed into components reflecting resource allocation to particular linguistic processes using regression. Allocation to word and textbase processes showed some consistency across the 3 text types and was predictive of memory performance. Older adults allocated more time to word and textbase processes than the young adults did but showed enhanced contextual facilitation. Structural equation modeling showed that greater resource allocation to word processes was required among readers with relatively low working memory spans and poorer verbal ability and that greater resource allocation to textbase processes was engendered by higher verbal ability. Results are discussed in terms of a model of self-regulated language processing suggesting that older readers may compensate for processing deficiencies through greater reliance on discourse context and on increases in resource allocation that are enabled through growth in crystallized ability.

Reading with filtered fixations: Adult age differences in the effectiveness of low-level properties of text within central vision.

“…In particular, interactions between visual processing and cognitive processes associated with the syntactic, linguistic, and semantic content of language are normal components of reading (e.g., Jordan & Thomas, 2002;Rayner, 2009) and are likely to involve the influence of spatial frequencies in central vision. Indeed, although the extent to which older adults benefit more from contextual cues during reading is controversial (e.g., Madden, 1988;Stine-Morrow, Miller, Gagne, & Hertzog, 2008;Federmeier & Kutas, 2005;Federmeier, Kutas, & Schul, 2010), loss of sensitivity to spatial frequencies in older age may be offset by a greater use of contextual information, and this is consistent with the view that older readers compensate for processing difficulties by a greater reliance on discourse context (e.g., Stine-Morrow et al, 2008). Moreover, for both young and older adults, when fixations Reading With Filtered Fixations 13 are made during reading, information is also acquired from locations extending outside central vision in the direction of reading, and this parafoveal information is used to pre-process the identity of words before the next saccade is made in their direction (see Rayner 1998Rayner , 2009).…”

Interactive effects of age and interface differences on search strategies and performance

“…The major reason was that we believe that the stabilized strategy across different interfaces of older adults did not translate to less adaptation. First, according to previous studies [10,22,24], the cost of using a different strategy (in this case a more bottom-up search strategy) was higher than its benefit. Because we believe that older participants had better background medical knowledge, the cost of transforming description from parts to systems or vice versa would be lower than those for younger participants.…”

“…Specifically, older adults would spend more time doing integration and elaboration than younger adults. This knowledge-driven reading helped older adults create situation models during reading [16,22]. In problemsolving research, a study found that older adults with fewer cognitive resources tended to look up less information and rely on their treatment knowledge to make faster treatment decisions than younger adults [15].…”

The Effects of Ageing and Visual Noise on Conceptual Integration during Sentence Reading

“…Allocation to decode the surface form and allocation for semantic analysis are typically correlated in nature (Stine-Morrow et al, 2008), but these processes can be dissociated by orienting tasks that manipulate levels of processing (Craik & Lockhart, 1972), which can be thought of as the more general cognitive principle underpinning the effortfulness hypothesis (e.g., Rosenberg & Schiller, 1971). There is some evidence with younger samples that external noise can impair semantic processing in language understanding.…”