Aging Effect On Emotional Word Processing During Chinese Reading:Evidence From Eye Movements

Substantial evidence indicates that older readers of alphabetic languages experience greater reading difficulty compared with younger adults.They tend to read more slowly and make more regressions than younger adults.They employ a more risky reading strategy in which words are skipped more frequently to compensate for age-related reading difficulty.However,Chinese belongs to orthography writing system that is different from alphabetic language system.Whether elderly Chinese readers also have a greater reading difficulty and employ a more risky reading strategy,related research is less at present.Moreover,emotion meaning of words will impact on lexical processing.Most of previous studies investigate how young adults process emotional words by behavior study,event-related potential technology and magnetic resonance imaging,suggesting that emotional words have advantages of processing than neutral words.However,it is not clear whether this advantage can be promoted to the elderly.Furthermore,previous studies have found that our eyes move to different locations in text reading to obtain the useful information for comprehension.And older readers tend to land on the first character of words than younger adults.It is worthy to be discussed how the emotion of the first character affects the lexical processing.Two studies including four experiments were carried out.Study 1 explored how the emotion of the whole word affects the processing of emotional words.The experiment 1 and experiment 2 separately examined college students and older adults process positive words or negative words in natural reading situation.Based on the findings of Study I,the next study further investigated how the emotion of the first character affects the processing of emotional words.The experiment 3 and experiment 4 separately examined college students and older adults process emotional words whose first character is positive or negative in natural reading situation.To summarize the findings of the two studies,the conclusion was made as follows.(1)Compared to young adults,the elderly read more slowly and made more regressions in Chinese reading,which was consistent with the findings of alphabetic languages.It means that the age-related reading difficulty is stable.(2)Compared to young adults,the elderly skipped less frequently and had shorter progressive saccade length,which was inconsistent with the findings of alphabetic languages.This means older Chinese reader tend to employ a more careful reading strategy rather than a more risky reading strategy.It may reflect the specific visual and linguistic requirements of the writing system.(3)The emotion of the first character affected the processing of emotional words.Compared to emotional words in which first character is neutral,there was longer fixation duration on emotional words in which first character is negative,and the attention of negative emotion is special to older adults.It suggests that the emotion of first character has a greater impact on older readers.