Eye Movement Study On Word Frequency, Word Predictability, And The Perceptual Span Of Older Adults In Reading Chinese

In recent years , the study on cognition aging of older adults is one of the most hot issue in the field of gerontic psychology research. As getting older, cognitive functioning of these people had partly degenerated in many aspects, cognitive pattern became different with young adults as well. However, the aging problem of obtaining information in Chinese reading demanded a further study. In present study , the eye movement technique was used to explore the eye movement characteristics of older adults.The current research includes two parts:The first research aimed at exploring the effect of word frequency and word predictability on the eye movements of older Adults in Reading Chinese. The participants were sixteen older adults and sixteen young adults with normal or corrected-to-normal vision. It is the mixed experimental design which is designed as 2 ( age: older adults and young adults )×2 (frequency: high frequency and low frequency)×2 (predictability: predictable context and unpredictable context).In order to investigate the size of the perception span in older adults during the sentence reading two experiment were designed in the second research.The size of the perception span in older adults during the sentence reading were investigated by using Character as presentation units In Experiment 1.16 older adults and 16 young adults participated in this experiment. The mixed experimental design was adopted as 2 ( age: older adults and young adults )×8 ( display conditions: no preview, R1, R2, R3, R4,L1R4,L2R4 and whole line condition ) .Experiment 2 was conducted to validate the size of the perceptual span which was obtained in Experiment 1 by using two character words as presentation units, the mixed experimental design was adopted as 2 ( age: older adults and young adults )×6 ( display conditions: no preview, R1, R2, L1R1,L1R2 and whole line condition ) .18 older adults and 18 young adults participated in this experiment.The results showed as follows:Firstly, older adults read more slowly, make more fixations and forward saccade counts than younger readers, They are more likely to skip a target word than are the younger readers.Secondly, older readers are also very much influenced by word frequency and word predictability. The frequency effect is larger for the older adults than for the younger adults. Older adults fixated longer on low-frequency words than on high-frequency words. Older readers' fixation time are shorter on high-predictable words than on low-predictable words.Finally, the perceptual span of older adults in Chinese reading includes three or four characters (two words) . It is smaller and more asymmetric than young adults. The perceptual span of successive fixations overlapped slightly in reading of older adults.