The “risky” reading strategy revisited: New simulations using E-Z Reader

Victoria A Mcgowan,Erik D Reichle

doi:10.1080/17470218.2017.1307424

Abstract

Eye-movement studies have demonstrated that, relative to college-aged readers, older readers of alphabetic languages like English and German tend to read more slowly, making more frequent and longer fixations and longer saccades, and skipping more words, but also making more frequent regressions. These findings have led to suggestions that older readers either adopt a "risky" strategy of using context to "guess" words as a way of compensating for slower rates of lexical processing, or have a smaller and more asymmetrical perceptual span. Unfortunately, neither of these hypotheses seemingly explains more recent observations that older readers of Chinese seem to adopt a more "conservative" strategy, making shorter saccades and skipping less often. In this paper, we use the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control to examine several possible accounts of the differences between college-aged and older readers of both alphabetic and non-alphabetic languages. These simulations re-confirm that the "risky" strategy may be sufficient to explain age-related differences in reader's eye movements, with older readers of English versus Chinese being, respectively, more versus less inclined to guess upcoming words. The implications of these results for aging, reading, and models of eye-movement control are discussed.

Highlights

In this article, the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control in reading (Reichle, Pollatsek, & Rayner, 2012) is used to evaluate three hypotheses about why the eye movements of older readers differ from those of younger, college-aged readers
It is fitting that this article be included among the contributions to this issue because it reports simulations using E-Z Reader to re-evaluate the “risky” reading strategy account that was proposed by Rayner et al (2006) to explain the patterns of eye movements observed with older readers, as well as testing two alternative accounts of these patterns
Changing parameters that modulate the effects of visual acuity (ε) or random saccadic error (η1 and η2) failed to replicate the eye-movement patterns of older readers of English or Chinese, suggesting that neither less efficient visual processing of text nor less accurate saccade targeting (e.g., Huaman & Sharpe, 1993) is sufficient to explain the eye-movement patterns of older readers

Summary

Introduction

The E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control in reading (Reichle, Pollatsek, & Rayner, 2012) is used to evaluate three hypotheses about why the eye movements of older readers (aged 65+ years) differ from those of younger, college-aged readers (aged 18–30 years). Older readers process more text to the right and so skip words more often, but process less text to the left and so frequently regress back to text outside the span This seemingly intuitive account provides a parsimonious fit with the pattern of eye movements observed in older readers (as confirmed by simulating these changes, in addition to the effects of reduced visual acuity and lexical inhibition, using the SWIFT model of eye-movement control during reading; Engbert, Nuthmann, Richter, & Kliegl, 2005). Studies that have examined age-related changes in parafoveal processing have indicated that the perceptual span of older readers is as asymmetric as, or possibly even more symmetric than, that of young adult readers (Rayner, Castelhano, & Yang, 2009, 2010; Rayner, Yang, Schuett, & Slattery, 2014; Risse & Kliegl, 2011; Whitford & Titone, 2016)

Objectives

Conclusion