Effects Of Word Predictability On Lexical Processing Of Young And Older Chinese Readers

Previous contextual information as top-down information influenced the lexical processing.For alphabetic languages,there were more skipping,shorter fixation time and saccade length,less fixations when reading more high predictability word,but there was inconsistent in older result.Some research suggested that older adults had a larger predictability effect,whereas others supported both young and older adults can use the prior context information maximally.All of the older adults predictability experiments also controlled other varies or used boundary paradigm,which increased the difficulty of reading processing.Difficulty affected the reading process,especially for older readers.Therefore,the current research presented the stimulus normally which including different predictable target words.By kinds of data analysis,this study investigated how did the context information influence the lexical processing of different age readers during Chinese reading.This study including two experiments.The first experiment,2(age:youth,old)× 2(predictability:high predictability,low predictability),controlled the predictability of the two-word target words to investigated the context information influence on lexical processing for young and old adults.The experiment used EyeLink 1000 to record the participants-(30 young and 30 older adults)eye movement when they read the stimulus that consist of 60 sentence frames.The results showed that the predictability effect was significant.Compared with the low-predictability words,there were higher skipping,shorter first-pass reading time and incoming saccade length in high predictability condition.Predictability and age interaction was significant,which older adults had larger predictability effects on fixation durations.The second experiment controlled the predictability of the one-word target words to investigated the context information influence on skipping for young and old adults when the words were easier to progress in the para fovea.These were 62 sentence frames and 80 participants(40 young and 40 older adults).The results showed that there were on predictability effect and interaction between the predictability and age on skipping.The interaction was significant on the total reading time,which older adults had a greater predictability effect.Conclusion:(1)In Chinese reading,compared with young adults,older adults adopted a more careful strategy.The reading processing had qualitative differences in different age groups.(2)In the process of Chinese reading,word predictability affected not only first pass reading time,but also the saccade selection.(3)The older adults made greater use of contextual knowledge to optimize reading strategies.However,the advantage of this predictability effect of older(compared to young people)was limited.When the processing was too simple or difficult,this advantage got weaker or even disappearing.