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

Sainan Zhao,Lin Li,Jingxin Wang,Min Chang,Kuo Zhang,Qianqian Xu,Kevin B Paterson

doi:10.1037/pag0000382

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 nonalphabetic language has characteristics that may promote such effects. Word-skipping 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 2 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. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Highlights

The simulations predict that, compared to young adults, older adults will have greater difficulty identifying lower frequency words due to slower lexical processing. This is corroborated by studies showing that, compared to young adults, older adults produce larger word frequency effects in both alphabetic languages (Kliegl et al, 2004; McGowan et al, 2014; Rayner et al, 2006, 2013; Whitford & Titone, 2017) and Chinese (Wang et al, 2018a,b; Zang et al, 2016)
Even the experiment that Rayner et al (2006) reported alongside their simulations of aging effects provided little evidence of a larger word predictability effect for older readers. They found that the high cloze predictability of a target word increased skipping rates only marginally more for older compared to younger adults, and shortened reading times for both age groups
As gaze durations provide a measure of the early processing of words associated with the process of lexical identification during reading (e.g., Rayner, 2009), and RPRT provides a measure of sentence integration difficulty (e.g., Liversedge et al, 1998), it appears that higher word predictability facilitated both the lexical identification of target words and their integration with prior context to a greater extent for the older compared to the younger adult readers

Summary

Introduction

Understanding how the influence of these variables changes with reading development (see, e.g., Blythe, 2014), and as a consequence of visual and cognitive decline in older age (see, e.g., Gordon, Lowder, & Hoedemaker, 2015), is important for understanding how reading behavior changes across the lifespan and for the future development of the theoretical models.

Results

Conclusion