The Influence Of Semantic Transparency On Chinese Reading And Its Age Difference

Radical semantic transparency refers to the degree to which the constituent radicals are semantically related to the meaning of the whole character,which is an attribute of compound words and plays an important role in the processing of compound words.Previous studies have shown that there is a semantic transparency effect in reading.Words with high semantic transparency are easier to be processed.In other words,words with low semantic transparency are stared longer than those with high semantic transparency.However,previous studies mostly used priming tasks,with little involvement of eye movements,and only examined the effect of semantic transparency in young adults.Whether semantic transparency would affect the lexical processing in Chinese reading in older adults is still unknown.Therefore,this study uses eye movement technology,controls the semantic transparency of target words,and adopts normal presentation paradigm and boundary paradigm to study the semantic transparency effect in the reading process of young and old Chinese readers.This study including two experiments.The design of the experiment 1 was a 2(age group:young,older)× 2(transparency: transparent,opaque)for the critical word analyses and involved28 young participants and 32 old participants.This experiment explores the effects of semantic transparency on reading and age differences in natural reading conditions.Materials were 80 sentence frames that contained a transparent or opaque target word.The results show that older adults read slower than young,and there is a main effect of semantic transparency and semantic transparency words are easier to be processed.The interaction between age and semantic transparency was not significant.In experiment 2,38 young participants and 26 old participants were selected,and a mixed experimental design of 2(agegroup: young,older)×2(transparency: transparent,opaque)× 2(preview: valid,invalid).Boundary paradigm was used in the experiment to explore the effects of semantic transparency of deputy central sunken information processing as well as the impact on the influence of the age difference.The results show that older adults read slower than young,and the semantic transparency effect of the elderly is greater than that of the young.The invalid preview produces more interference to the young adults than to the old adults There were also no three-way interactions for any reading time measures.Through the above research,the following conclusions can be drawn:(1)In the process of reading in Chinese,compared with the young adults,the older adults have typical reading difficulties,and they adopt a more cautious reading strategy.(2)Semantic transparency effect exists in Chinese reading process.(3)In the condition of parafoveal preview older adults are more affected by semantic transparency.