Abstract
Reductions in stimulus quality may disrupt the reading performance of older adults more when compared with young adults because of sensory declines that begin early in middle age. However, few studies have investigated adult age differences in the effects of stimulus quality on reading, and none have examined how this affects lexical processing and eye movement control. Accordingly, we report two experiments that examine the effects of reduced stimulus quality on the eye movements of young (18–24 years), middle-aged (41–51 years), and older (65+ years) adult readers. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences that contained a high- or low-frequency critical word and that were presented normally or with contrast reduced so that words appeared faint. Experiment 2 further investigated effects of reduced stimulus quality using a gaze-contingent technique to present upcoming text normally or with contrast reduced. Typical patterns of age-related reading difficulty (e.g., slower reading, more regressions) were observed in both experiments. In addition, eye movements were disrupted more for older than younger adults when all text (Experiment 1) or just upcoming text (Experiment 2) appeared faint. Moreover, there was an interaction between stimulus quality and word frequency (Experiment 1), such that readers fixated faint low-frequency words for disproportionately longer. Crucially, this effect was similar across all age groups. Thus, although older readers suffer more from reduced stimulus quality, this additional difficulty primarily affects their visual processing of text. These findings have important implications for understanding the role of stimulus quality on reading behavior across the lifespan.
Highlights
Reductions in stimulus quality may disrupt the reading performance of older adults more when compared with young adults because of sensory declines that begin early in middle age
Compared with middle-aged adults, older adults produced longer sentence reading times ( ϭ 475.58, SE ϭ 240.46, t ϭ 1.98), made more regressions ( ϭ 0.65, SE ϭ 0.10, t ϭ 2.45), and produced longer rereading times ( ϭ 509.20, SE ϭ 167.64, t ϭ 3.04), whereas the performance of middle-aged adults and young adults did not differ significantly. These results reflect adult age differences in reading for those aged 65 and older compared with younger readers, in line with previous research (e.g., Rayner et al, 2006, 2009)
Despite interactions between stimulus quality and word frequency, these two-way interactions did not further interact with age group. These results indicate that compared with other age groups, the reading of older adults was more disrupted by poor stimulus quality, this was not related to particular difficulties with lexical processing
Summary
Reductions in stimulus quality may disrupt the reading performance of older adults more when compared with young adults because of sensory declines that begin early in middle age. Few studies have investigated adult age differences in the effects of stimulus quality on reading, and none have examined how this affects lexical processing and eye movement control. We report two experiments that examine the effects of reduced stimulus quality on the eye movements of young (18 –24 years), middle-aged (41–51 years), and older (65ϩ years) adult readers. Older readers suffer more from reduced stimulus quality, this additional difficulty primarily affects their visual processing of text. Numerous studies with young adult participants show that words are more difficult to recognize when stimulus quality is reduced by presenting text in lower contrast so that words appear faint (e.g., Becker & Killion, 1977). We used measures of eye movements during reading to shed light on adult age differences in the effects of stimulus quality on reading performance, and effects of stimulus quality on lexical processing
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