Efficient word segmentation is preserved in older adult readers: Evidence from eye movements during Chinese reading.

Abstract

College-aged readers use efficient strategies to segment and recognize words in naturally unspaced Chinese text. Whether this capability changes across the adult lifespan is unknown, although segmenting words in unspaced text may be challenging for older readers due to visual and cognitive declines in older age, including poorer parafoveal processing of upcoming characters. Accordingly, we conducted two eye movement experiments to test for age differences in word segmentation, each with 48 young (18-30 years) and 36 older (65+ years) native Chinese readers. Following Zhou and Li (2021), we focused on the processing of "incremental" three-character words, like 幼儿园 (meaning "kindergartens"), which contain an embedded two-character word (e.g., 幼儿, meaning "children"). In Experiment 1, either the threecharacter word or its embedded word was presented as the target word in sentence contexts where the threecharacter word always was plausible, and the embedded word was either plausible or implausible. Both age groups produced similar plausibility effects, suggesting age constancy in accessing the embedded word early during ambiguity processing before ultimately assigning an incremental word analysis. Experiment 2 provided further evidence that both younger and older readers access the embedded word early during ambiguity processing, but rapidly select the appropriate (incremental) word. Crucially, the findings suggest that word segmentation strategies do not differ with age. Public Significance StatementThe ability to segment unspaced text into words is fundamental for reading in writing systems that do not use spaces to indicate the boundaries between words in text. This includes character-based scripts, like Chinese and Japanese; alphabetic scripts that do not contain spacing, like Thai; and languages in which long words are composed of multiple units of meaning, like Finnish. Given typical age-related declines in perception and some aspects of cognition, our study focused on whether older readers have difficulty relative to the young in segmenting unspaced text into words. The findings suggest that the ability to segment words is retained by older readers.

Adult age differences in language, communication, and learning from text.

“…While this is straightforward in English because words are separated by spaces, not all languages do this. Li et al (2024) considered the case of Chinese, a logographic language in which words are typically represented by two or three characters and words are not demarcated by spacing. Fluent Chinese readers segment the text into words based on context, but it is not entirely clear how this is accomplished.…”