Abstract
Age-related reading difficulty is well established for alphabetic languages. Compared to young adults (18-30 years), older adults (65+ years) read more slowly, make more and longer fixations, make more regressions, and produce larger word-frequency effects. However, whether similar effects are observed for nonalphabetic languages like Chinese remains to be determined. In particular, recent research has suggested Chinese readers experience age-related reading difficulty but do not produce age differences in the word-frequency effect. This might represent an important qualitative difference in aging effects, so we investigated this further by presenting young and older adult Chinese readers with sentences that included high- or low-frequency target words. Additionally, to test theories that suggest reductions in text-stimulus quality differentially affect lexical processing by adult age groups, we presented either the target words (Experiment 1) or all characters in sentences (Experiment 2) normally or with stimulus quality reduced. Analyses based on mean eye-movement parameters and distributional analyses of fixation times for target words showed typical age-related reading difficulty. We also observed age differences in the word-frequency effect, predominantly in the tails of fixation-time distributions, consistent with an aging effect on the processing of high- and low-frequency words. Reducing stimulus quality disrupted eye movements more for the older readers, but the influence of stimulus quality on the word-frequency effect did not differ across age groups. This suggests Chinese older readers' lexical processing is resilient to reductions in stimulus quality, perhaps due to greater experience recognizing words from impoverished visual input. (PsycINFO Database Record
Highlights
Age-related reading difficulty is well-established for alphabetic languages
Distributional analyses of fixation times (FFD and gaze duration (GD)) on target words (e.g., Staub et al, 2010; White & Staub, 2012) revealed that age-group differences produced a shift and rightward skew in these distributions. Vincentile plots suggested these effects are due to older adults making both generally longer and more very long fixation times on words than young adults, consistent with previous research using these methods (Rayner et al, 2013; see Payne & Stine-Morrow, 2014)
The findings show typical patterns of age-related reading difficulty in Chinese reading and a pervasive influence on eye-fixation durations on words similar to that observed in studies with alphabetic languages
Summary
Age-related reading difficulty is well-established for alphabetic languages. Compared to young adults (18-30 years), older adults (65+ years) read more slowly, make more and longer fixations, more regressions, and produce larger word frequency effects. Some studies show that older adults produce larger word frequency effects than young adults, by fixating for longer on words that have a lower frequency of written usage (Kliegl et al, 2004; McGowan et al, 2014; Rayner et al, 2006, 2013; Whitford & Titone, 2017) Such findings are consistent with older adults experiencing greater difficulty identifying words during reading due to slower lexical processing in older adulthood. Aging effects in alphabetic languages are simulated in these models by adjusting key parameters, including slowing the rate of lexical processing, so that the models predict larger word frequency effects for older readers (Laubrock, Kliegl, & Engbert, 2006; Rayner et al, 2006) If such effects are not observed in Chinese, this might indicate an important limitation to these models. The design of the study allowed us to examine if text stimulus quality modulates these effects, and if this influence of stimulus quality on the word frequency effect differs across adult age groups
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