Effects Of Font Size And Spacing On Chinese Reading The Newspaper Material In Urban Low-age Senior Citizens

With the aging society process intensified, researchers pay more and more attention of the demand of elderly people. The study of reading experience of the old hasn’t been drawn enough attention by researchers, even though reading is very important among the cognitive activity. Previous researchers studied the effects of typographic variables on eye-movement measures in reading Chinese, but the effect between front size and spacing for elderly people is still unsure. To investigate the most efficient way to represent text in reading Chinese, two typographic variables, font size (0.705/20pound and0.806/24pound), line spacing (one line and one and half line) were manipulated. Thirty-two native unban low-age senior Chinese readers, aged60to69, were asked to read8simple passages and then answer four multiple-choice questions. The factor of difficulty (F(7,136)=0.875,p=0.534) and familiarity (F(7,128)=0.862,p=0.687) of each text was manipulated to equal. All of the texts were displayed on Song font style.Participants were seated60cm from the screen, and head movements were minimized through the use of a chin rest. Eye movements were recorded with an iView X RED manufactured by Senso-Motoric Instruments (SMI). The eye tracker sampled at250Hz.The eye-movement analyses revealed that text in larger-size characters had shorter fixation duration, fewer fixations and faster reading rate than text in small-size characters. While under the wider line spacing condition, the elderly read faster with shorter total fixation time than in narrow line spacing. Considering the reading experience, the subjects prefer larger charter and wider line-spacing condition.