The Influence Of Parafoveal Processing On Saccade Target Seclection For Older Readers During Chinese Reading

In Chinese reading,older adults employ a“cautious”reading strategy:slower reading speed,more fixations and regressions,but shorter forward saccadic length and smaller skipping.Parafoveal processing plays an important role in information processing,such as facilitating the word recognition,guiding the saccade landing position.The impaired parafoveal processing may be related to the lower reading ability and different eye movement control for older adults.Only a few studies have examined older adults’ information processing in parafoveal,furthermore,these researches only found that they can obtain a few types of information and need more time to complete visual coding,however,litter has known about the processing range in parafoveal:did it change and become smaller than young adults’ processing range?At the same time,some researchers suggested the difficulty existing in word recognition is associated with the situation that older adults can’t obtain the word boundary information,these lead to a question:Compared with youngers,does older adults’ processing range in parafoveal gets smaller,and if they can’t obtain word boundary information during reading,our study investigated these problems through two experiments and how parafoveal preview influence eye movement control.In the first experiment,we manipulated the preview conditions of word N+1 and word N+2 in both young and old readers by using boundary paradigm to investigate their parafoveal processing range and how this range influence saccadic target selection.The results show that:(1)Both the old and young readers can preview the information of words N+l and the word N+2,however,compared with young adults,preview effect size in words N+1 is smaller for older readers.(2)Both readers’ saccadic target selection is influenced by the preview conditions.When the preview information is real words,it causes readers had a longer forward saccadic distance,and their fixation location is far from words’ beginning.In the second experiment on the basis of first experiment,we manipulated the types of preview and the preview conditions in character N+2?.We aimed to investigate if old readers can obtain word boundary information from parafoveal and how it influence the saccadic target selection.The results show that:(1)To some extent,they can all obtain the N+2 information whenever it was a character or single word,but the preview effect size were smaller when reader was older adults.(2)In the target region,compared with the condition that N+1 and N+2 could combine a two-character words,the readers’ fixation time was longer and they had a longer forward saccadic distance when N+1 and N+2 were both one-character words.The results of the two experiments suggest that during the reading:(1)Oder adults’ parafoveal preview range is same as young adults’ range,but the preview effect size is smaller.(2)Both readers can obtain word boundary information in parafoveal,and these information can lead to choose saccadic targets.The above results show that older readers adopt a more "cautious" reading strategy,which may be related to the aging of parafoveal preview.