Abstract
Older adults experience greater difficulty compared to young adults during both alphabetic and nonalphabetic reading. However, while this age-related reading difficulty may be attributable to visual and cognitive declines in older adulthood, the underlying causes remain unclear. With the present research, we focused on effects related to the visual complexity of written language. Chinese is ideally suited to investigating such effects, as characters in this logographic writing system can vary substantially in complexity (in terms of their number of strokes, i.e., lines and dashes) while always occupying the same square area of space, so that this complexity is not confounded with word length. Nonreading studies suggests older adults have greater difficulty than young adults when recognizing characters with high compared to low numbers of strokes. The present research used measures of eye movements to investigate adult age differences in these effects during natural reading. Young adult (18–28 years) and older adult (65+ years) participants read sentences that included one of a pair of two-character target words matched for lexical frequency and contextual predictability, but composed of either high-complexity (>9 strokes) or low-complexity (≤7 strokes) characters. Typical patterns of age-related reading difficulty were observed. However, an effect of visual complexity in reading times for words was greater for the older than for the younger adults, due to the older readers experiencing greater difficulty identifying words containing many rather than few strokes. We interpret these findings in terms of the influence of subtle deficits in visual abilities on reading capabilities in older adulthood.
Highlights
Older adults experience greater difficulty compared to young adults during both alphabetic and nonalphabetic reading
We focused on the influence of the visual complexity of written language, which may make an important perceptual contribution to age-related reading difficulty
We aimed to provide a clear demonstration of adult age differences in the effects of the visual complexity of Chinese characters during reading
Summary
Older adults experience greater difficulty compared to young adults during both alphabetic and nonalphabetic reading. Zang et al (2016) showed that the complexity of a single-character word has an larger influence on reading times (but not word-skipping rates) for older relative to younger adults, these effects were complicated by complex interactions between these variables and lexical frequency Such findings suggest that the visual complexity of characters is a specific source of agerelated difficulty in Chinese reading. A recent study using this task with Chinese characters showed span size for complex characters is even smaller for older than for younger adults (Xie et al, 2019), providing further evidence that character complexity is a source of age-related perceptual difficulty Such findings may be important in relation to accounts that assume Chinese word recognition begins by extracting character stroke information (Taft, Liu, & Zhu, 1999). If older readers have specific difficulty processing stroke information in visually complex characters, this may impede their recognition of words relative to younger adult readers
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