The Influence Of Irrelevant Words On The Reading Of Texts By Elderly Readers

The irrelevant background sound is always influencing the current memory cognition task,which is called the irrelevant speech effect.As an essential cognitive activity in human daily life,reading is also seriously disturbed by irrelevant words.Studies on the effect of irrelevant speech in young readers show that there are two main mechanisms:the hypothesis of phonological similarity interference and the hypothesis of process interference.The articulation-like interference hypothesis holds that it is speech that interferes while the process-interference hypothesis holds that semantics play a dominant role.However,for the elderly whose cognitive ability declines in all aspects,some researchers(Hasher & Zacks,1988)believe that the elderly have a general inhibition defect,while others(Rouleau & Belleville,1996)believe that the elderly are only impaired in semantic interference inhibition ability.It can be seen that the effect and mechanism of unrelated speech on the elderly are still unclear.In addition,the process of reading involves such processes as word recognition and semantic integration,and the influence of irrelevant words on the process of word processing will be helpful to further reveal its mechanism.In this study,eye movement tracking technology was used to record the eye movement behaviors of the elderly and the young people in reading passages under different background sound conditions,so as to test how irrelevant speech affects the reading and vocabulary process of the elderly Chinese readers and its mechanism.2(age group: young people,old people)× 3(background sound condition: quiet,meaningless words,meaningful words)was used in the experiment.The elderly and young subjects were required to read the expository text in the background of the story in quiet,uyghur and Chinese.The results show that :(1)older readers have reading difficulties.Compared with young people,the total reading time of older readers is longer,the average gaze time is longer,the length of the forward jump is shorter,and the reading speed is slower.(2)there was irrelevant speech effect in the Chinese text reading task.Compared with the quiet and meaningless words,meaningful words seriously affected the text reading efficiency of the subjects,and there was no significantdifference in the influence of background sounds on the elderly and the young.(3)irrelevant speech affects the late processing of vocabulary.The results showed that there was no inhibition defect when the elderly suppressed the interference of irrelevant background sound during reading,which supported the process interference hypothesis.