Effects Of Visual Quality Of Text On Reading Chinese For Older And Young Readers: Evidence From Eye Movement Research

Age-related changes in eye movements during reading are well-established for alphabetic languages. Compared to young adults, older adults read more slowly, make more and longer fixations, more regressions, and produce larger word frequency effects, but as older readers also skip words more frequently, and make longer progressive saccades (forward eye movements), it appears they compensate for their poorer processing of text by employing a risky reading strategy (Rayner, Yang, Schuett,& Slattery,2013). However, little is known about the effects of aging on eye movements when reading Chinese. Thus, the present research examined the eye movements of young and older adult readers of Chinese, and investigated the resilience of readers to changes in the visual quality of text by presenting a specific target word (Experiment 1), or all characters in a sentence (Experiment 2), either normally or with reduced visual contrast (i.e., faint). There are three variables in current experiments, age group, visual quality, word frequency.In experiment 1, the visual quality of a high or low frequency target word was manipulated, so that this word was shown either normally or faint and all the other characters in the sentence were shown normally. The results indicated that older adults find more difficult to read compare do younger adults. Interactions of age group and visual quality were obtained due to a much larger disruptive effect of displaying words as faint for the elder adults than the young adults. Older adults had larger word frequency effects than the young adults. Interactions between visual quality and word frequency were significant for gaze durations, regression path reading times and total reading times, these interactions were due to larger word frequency effects when target words were faint than normal. In Experiment 1, only a target word in each sentence was displayed as faint when visual quality was reduced. Consequently, the manipulation of visual quality may have cued readers to the nature of the manipulation and induced a particular word processing strategy. Therefore, to address this issue further, Experiment 2 manipulated the target word and all other characters in the sentence were either faint or shown normally. The results of experiment2 were similar to experimentl, but unlike in experiment1 there was no indication of an interaction between visual quality and word frequency in fixation times for the target words.The result show that:(1) The older adults have more difficult in reading Chinese compare do younger adults.(2) The older readers are less resilient to variation in the visual contrast of text.(3) By contrast with older readers of alphabetic languages, older Chinese readers adapt to changes in their visual and reading abilities in older life by employing a more careful reading strategy in which they are less likely than younger readers to skip words.(4) The visual quality of text affects only visual processing, and not lexical processing when reading Chinese.