An Eye Movement Study Of The Prevision Effect Of The Parafovea For Chinese Elderly Readers

During reading,readers get information not only from the foveal,but also from the parafoveal,such as phonologic,semantic and orthographic of words.So the processing of the parafoveal words will be promote and the reading time will be reduced when readers fixate the word,it was called parafoveal preview benefit.The parafoveal information processing ability is an important factor affecting the reading efficiency of readers.Studies on Chinese reading have shown that readers can obtain phonologic and semantic information from word N+1,but there is still a dispute over the role and occurrence stage of phonologic information in Chinese character processing.As the age increases,the reading efficiency of the elderly decreases,reading becomes more and more difficult,so old readers adopted different reading strategies.According to the research on Chinese reading,olders show the "cautious" reading characteristic,such as longer fixation time,more fixation counts,more regression counts,lower skip rates and longer forward saccade length.Based on previous studies,for old readers,the perceptual span reduced,the efficiency of word processing declined,and they had difficultly in eye guidance.All these may be caused by the weakening of the information processing ability in parafoveal,so the olders had difficulty in reading.Whether the information obtained from the parafoveal of the elderly is reduced? If it is reduced,is it a reduction in the type of information obtained,or is it just a reduction in the amount of preview information? Few studies have systematically explored this issue.In this study,two experiments were conducted to explore the parafoveal processing of young and old readers.This study using the boundary paradigm,manipulating the preview types of target words in sentences,to explore the parafoveal processing of Chinese young and old readers and reveal why the reading efficiency of older readers is readuced.Experiment one is aimed to investigating the extration of orthographic and phonologic preview information of older readers.In experiment one,compound words were used as the experimental materials,and four types of preview information(Identical preview,orthographic preview,phonological preview and unrelated preview)were set.In experiment two,the single character was used as experimental material to investigate whether the old readers could obtain semantic preview information.Three preview conditions(Identical preview,semantic preview and unrelated preview)were set in this experiment.The experiment required young andold participants to read sentences containing keywords and record their eye movements at the same time.According to the two experiments,the following conclusions are drawn :(1)Compared with young readers,old readers need more sentence reading time,more fixation counts,more regression counts,lower skip rates and longer forward saccade length,showing a "cautious" reading stratagy.(2)The amount of preview information obtained by old readers from the parafoveal is significantly less than that of young readers.(3)Both young and old readers can obtain orthographic and semantic preview information from parafoveal.Neither the old readers nor the young readers can get the phonologic preview information.The above results show that,for old readers,the parafoveal information processing ability was weakened,which was mainly caused by the reduction of the amount of preview information.This may be one of the reasons why older readers have difficulty in reading.