A further look at ageing and word predictability effects in Chinese reading: Evidence from one-character words

Reliance on semantic and structural heuristics in sentence comprehension across the lifespan

“…That is, older adults may impose more top-down predictions on a sentence representation. This account is in line with increased effects of predictability and context shown in older adults in eye-tracking-while-reading and self-paced-reading studies (Rayner et al, 2006; Zhao et al, 2020). Another possible mechanism is that reliance on heuristic processing is an unconscious strategy allowing to spare older adults’ limited cognitive resources for other cognitive needs (Hess, 2000; Peters et al, 2011), such as verbal working memory (Beese et al, 2019a, 2019b).…”

Adult age differences in parafoveal preview effects during reading: Evidence from Chinese.

“…Table 2 shows sentence-level means and summarizes statistical effects. Compared to the young adults, the older adults had longer reading times, made more fixations and regressions and marginally shorter forward saccades, with no age difference in average fixation duration, resonant with previous findings (Li, L. et al, 2019;Li, S. et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2018a,b;Zang et al, 2016;Zhao et al, 2019Zhao et al, , 2020.…”

“…The present study investigated age differences in N + 1 and N + 2 preview effects in Chinese reading. The findings replicate the previous evidence for less fluent reading by older adults (Li et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2018aWang et al, , 2018bZang et al, 2016;Zhao et al, 2019Zhao et al, , 2021, as well as previous evidence for N + 1 and N + 2 preview benefits (Yan et al, 2010;Yang et al, 2009Yang et al, , 2012. Specifically, we found that masking N + 1 or N + 2 (or both) attenuated preview benefits in subsequent fixations on words.…”

“…In particular, older adults appear to read Chinese almost twice as slowly as young adults (and so appear to experience a larger reading speed slowdown as compared to older readers of alphabetic scripts). They also dwell for longer on words, by making more and longer fixations and also more regressions, and make generally shorter forward eye movements (e.g., Li et al, 2018Li et al, , 2019Wang et al, 2018aWang et al, , 2018bZang et al, 2016;Zhao et al, 2019Zhao et al, , 2021; for a review, see Paterson et al, 2020). These shorter forward eye movements, in particular, suggest that eye guidance may benefit less from parafoveal processing in Chinese reading for older relative to younger adults.…”

Understanding mechanisms of prediction error cost in Chinese reading for older adults

“…预测加工是大脑的基本工作方式, 通过预测 编码、计算预测误差来进行正确的信息推断 (Clark, 2013;Schuster et al, 2021)。近年来, 句子理解的 观点一直在向更广泛地接受语言的"预加工"转变, 即整个阅读过程是基于不断预测达成的读者与文 本的交互对话过程 (Willems et al, 2016)。 "完形概率"是测量阅读材料中目标词预测性 的主要方式 (Taylor, 1953;Zhao et al, 2021;Zhao et al, 2019)。 读者进行完形填空任务, 根据目标词 前面的句子内容给出最先想到的词, 给出目标词 的读者占所有读者的比例即为该词的完形概率。 语境是决定词汇预测性的关键因素 (Balota et al, 1985)。语境给出的信息越详细、限制性越强(限制 性语境), 读者越有可能做出强有力的预测; 但如 果语境给出的信息模糊(非限制性语境), 读者做 出的预测就会较弱且随机。阅读的眼动研究发现 了预测性效应(predictability effect), 即读者对高 预测词的注视时间比对低预测词更短, 且更容易 跳读 (Balota et al, 1985;Ehrlich & Rayner, 1981;Rayner & Well, 1996;Staub, 2015;Zhao et al, 2021;Zhao et al, 2019); 阅读的电生理研究也发现, 随 着预测性的降低, N400 波幅增大 (Kretzschmar et al, 2015) (1) 在限制性和非限制性语境下, 老年人和 青年人是否会产生不同的预测误差成本, 采用不 同的预测加工机制;…”