A Study Of Cognitive Aging In Connecting Inference Processing During Chinese Text Reading

Older adults’ reading,alongside the growing aging population,has evoked great concern from home and abroad.With the decline of cognitive functions which is manifested in their reducing cognitive processing resources,such as processing speed,working memory,attention,and inhibition ability,older adults’ reading abilities,including inferential processing abilities in text reading,may decrease accordingly as they grow older.Text reading generally involves inference,an important psychological processing activity,and successful inference is the key to comprehending a text and constructing its representations.Among various types of inference,connecting inference is indispensable for text comprehension in that it is crucial to construct a complete and coherent mental representation.Therefore,with the trend of increasingly severe population aging in the world,it is of great significance to conduct research on the cognitive aging in connecting inference processing during Chinese text reading.This study explored the cognitive aging of connecting inference processing during Chinese text reading through three experiments and analyzed the data with LMEMs in R.Experiment 1 employed eye tracking technique to examine whether the older and the young adults can generate connecting inference online while reading Chinese texts and whether there is aging effect in the generation of connecting inference.Thirty older adults and thirty-two young adults participated in this experiment in which thirty pairs of three-sentence Chinese texts were used as experimental materials.The results indicated that the total reading time,the second-pass reading time,the fixation and regression count as well as the second-pass fixation count in the first area of interest（AOI）for the inference text were considerably greater than those for the control text.So were the regression path duration and regression out count in the second AOI.In addition,the response time of comprehension questions for the inference text was shorter relative to those for the control text.These results suggested that both the older and the young adults can generate connecting inference online.We also observed greater total reading time,regression path duration,fixation count and response time of older adults than those of young adults,indicating the aging effect in the immediate activation of connecting inference during Chinese text reading.Experiment 2 was designed to deploy the reading time method to investigate whether the older and young adults can maintain connecting inference generated online in working memory and whether there is cognitive aging in this process.Eighteen pairs of six-sentence Chinese texts were adopted as experimental stimuli,and twenty-eight older adults and thirty-two young adults were invited as participants.We found that,compared to those in the control text,the reading time of critical and concluding sentences in the inference text was considerably longer for the older and the young adults,indicating that participants were able to maintain the connecting inference in working memory representation,and there was a strong spillover effect on inference.Additionally,the reading time of critical and concluding sentences as well as the response time of comprehension questions for the older adults were remarkably longer relative to those for the young adults,suggesting the cognitive aging in maintaining connecting inference.In Experiment 3,the reading time method was also applied to further explore whether the older and the young adults can encode the generated connecting inference into long-term memory representation and whether there is cognitive aging in this encoding process.Twenty-eight older adults and thirty-two young adults read eighteen pairs of eleven-sentence Chinese texts.The results showed that the reading time of critical sentences in the inference text for the older and the young adults was substantially longer than those in the control text,indicating that they were capable of integrating the connecting inference into long-term memory representation.Nevertheless,no significant difference was observed between the inference and the control texts in regards to reading time of concluding sentences,demonstrating that there was no spillover effect on inference.Moreover,the reading time of critical and concluding sentences as well as the response time of comprehension questions for the older adults were greatly longer as compared to those for the young adults,indicating the aging effect in encoding connecting inference.The present study which investigated the cognitive aging mechanism of connecting inference processing during Chinese text reading not only expands the methodologies by performing an eye-tracking experiment and two behavioral experiments,but also enriches the research on inferential processing during text comprehension.The results,to a certain extent,provide valuable insights for future cognitive aging research on inferential processing during reading.In the field of inferential processing during reading,this study attempts to construct a model of cognitive aging in connecting inference processing during Chinese text reading for the first time,offering a theoretical framework for the future research on language aging and its training.