Effects Of Inter-Character Spacing On The Reading Of Young And Older Chinese Readers

The study includes two experiments that investigated effects of changes in inter-character spacing on the eye movements of young(18-35 years)and older(65+years)Chinese readers Compared to young adults,older adults experience greater reading difficulty due to visual and cognitive declines in older age.In particular,older adults appear to suffer more from effects of visual crowding,which is increased difficulty recognizing an object when closely surrounded by visually similar objects.Numerous studies suggest increased text spacing can offset visual crowding, and therefore benefit readers who are vulnerable to its effects,such as children with developmental dyslexia.However,research has not investigated if similar benefits are observed for older readers. Accordingly,we investigated this issue.Moreover,we specifically investigated the issue in Chinese as research also suggests that crowding effects vary depending on the visual complexity of Chinese characters.To do so,we conducted two eye movement experiments with skilled young and older adult readers.24 participants participated in the experiment.An EyeLink 2000 eye-tracker recorded each participant's right-eye gaze location every millisecond during binocular viewing.Participants read sentences composed mostly of simple(number of strokes<7)or complex(number of strokes>9) characters,presented either with normal inter-character spacing or increased(3pt)or decreased(3pt) inter-character spacing.This study is divided into two experiments.Experiment 1 mainly studies the influence of inter-character spacing and word frequency on young and older adult readers.Typical patterns of age-related reading difficulty were observed.Moreover,there is no significant difference in the effect of inter-character spacing on high and low frequency words.However,compared to young readers,older adult readers have longer fixation durations,more fixation counts and shorter saccade length.Experiment 2 mainly studies the influence of inter-character spacing on the reading of young and older adult readers under different visual complexity Chinese characters.Under conditions of low visual complexity,there is no significant difference in the impact of inter-character spacing on young and older adult readers.However,under conditions of high visual complexity.Compared to young readers,older adult readers have longer fixation durations,more fixation counts and shorter saccade length.Combining the results of two experiments can show(1)Typical patterns of age-related reading difficulty were observed.But unlike the risk reading strategies used by older adults in the alphabet.Chinese older adults adopt a cautious reading strategy.Compared to young adults,older adults read more slowly,had longer sentences reading times,more and longer fixations,more regressions and shorter forward saccades.(2)In addition,there is no significant difference in the effect of inter-character spacing on low frequency and high frequency words.(3)Significant interactions between age-group and spacing condition were found which were due to reading processes were disrupted more for the older than younger adults when spacing was decreased than increased.