Revealing similarities in the perceptual span of young and older Chinese readers.

Fang Xie,Victoria A Mcgowan,Lin Li,Jingxin Wang,Kevin B Paterson,Sarah J White,Kayleigh L Warrington,Min Chang

doi:10.1177/1747021819899826

Fang Xie, Victoria A Mcgowan + Show 6 more

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https://doi.org/10.1177/1747021819899826

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Abstract

Older readers (aged 65+ years) of both alphabetic languages and character-based languages like Chinese read more slowly than their younger counterparts (aged 18-30 years). A possible explanation for this slowdown is that, due to age-related visual and cognitive declines, older readers have a smaller perceptual span and so acquire less information on each fixational pause. However, although aging effects on the perceptual span have been investigated for alphabetic languages, no such studies have been reported to date for character-based languages like Chinese. Accordingly, we investigated this issue in three experiments that used different gaze-contingent moving window paradigms to assess the perceptual span of young and older Chinese readers. In these experiments, text was shown either entirely as normal or normal only within a narrow region (window) comprising either the fixated word, the fixated word, and one word to its left, or the fixated word and either one or two words to its right. Characters outside these windows were replaced using a pattern mask (Experiment 1) or a visually similar character (Experiment 2), or blurred to render them unidentifiable (Experiment 3). Sentence reading times were overall longer for the older compared with the younger adults and differed systematically across display conditions. Crucially, however, the effects of display condition were essentially the same across the two age groups, indicating that the perceptual span for Chinese does not differ substantially for the older and young adults. We discuss these findings in relation to other evidence suggesting the perceptual span is preserved in older adulthood.

Highlights

The following additional eye movement measures are included in the Supplementary File: average fixation duration; number of fixations; number of regressions; progressive saccade length (the amplitude of forward-moving saccades)
General Discussion The present study used a moving window paradigm and window sizes shown previously to produce age differences in perceptual span effects for English (Rayner et al, 2009) to establish if similar effects are observed in Chinese reading
They showed that older adults had longer reading times and slower reading rates compared to young adults in all three experiments, including when comparing effects in conditions in which sentences were presented entirely as normal

Summary

Introduction

The size of the span can be estimated by systematically varying the size of the moving window across an experiment, following the logic that windows which produce normal reading rates must contain all the linguistic information required for reading to be normal Research using this paradigm shows that skilled young adult readers of alphabetic scripts like English obtain useful information from a region extending about 3-4 letters to the left of fixation and up to 14-15 letters to the right (McConkie & Rayner, 1975, 1976; Rayner, Well, & Pollatsek, 1980). If span size is measured in words rather than graphemes, the rightward span for Chinese is about two words and so the same for both scripts (Inhoff & Liu, 1998; Rayner, 1986; Rayner et al, 1982)

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