Sass Sarah M, Legge Gordon E, Lee Hye-Won
Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.
Optom Vis Sci. 2006 Mar;83(3):166-77. doi: 10.1097/01.opx.0000204752.43520.17.
Reading is a dynamic task involving both linguistic and visual analysis. In this study, we asked how two types of linguistic information--characters used in segmenting words from one another, and sentence context--differ in their usefulness for people with normal and low vision. Given evidence for age-related differences in some forms of cognitive processing, we also investigated the effect of age.
There were four groups of 10 participants: vision status (normal, low) crossed with age (young, <35 years; old, >65 years). Reading speeds were compared for regularly spaced text and text in which the spaces were removed, a manipulation intended to eliminate local cues for text segmentation and force attention to clusters of letters or whole words. We also evaluated the effect of sentence context by comparing reading speeds for regular sentences and sentences in which word order was scrambled.
Removal of spaces had a greater impact on low vision than normal vision, reducing average speeds to 45% and 66% of speeds for regularly spaced text, respectively. We interpret this to mean that people with low vision have less access to spatially distributed linguistic regularities of text such as prefixes, suffixes, or word length. Removal of sentence context through scrambling had a greater impact on normal vision than low vision, reducing mean reading speed to 53% and 66%, respectively. Finally, comparison of our young and old readers showed no major differences in the use of sentence context or in the impact of removing spaces between words.
People with low vision appear to rely more on spacing information in sentences, whereas people with normal vision appear to make better use of sentence context, irrespective of age.
阅读是一项涉及语言和视觉分析的动态任务。在本研究中，我们探讨了两种语言信息——用于分词的字符和句子语境——对正常视力和低视力人群的有用性有何不同。鉴于某些形式的认知加工存在与年龄相关的差异，我们还研究了年龄的影响。
共有四组，每组10名参与者：视力状况（正常、低视力）与年龄（年轻，<35岁；年老，>65岁）交叉分组。比较了间隔规则文本和去除空格文本的阅读速度，去除空格旨在消除文本分割的局部线索，迫使读者关注字母簇或整个单词。我们还通过比较正常句子和词序打乱句子的阅读速度来评估句子语境的影响。
去除空格对低视力人群的影响比对正常视力人群的影响更大，平均阅读速度分别降至间隔规则文本速度的45%和66%。我们认为这意味着低视力人群较难获取文本在空间上分布的语言规律，如前缀、后缀或单词长度。通过打乱词序去除句子语境对正常视力人群的影响比对低视力人群的影响更大，平均阅读速度分别降至53%和66%。最后，对年轻读者和年老读者的比较表明，在句子语境的利用或去除单词间空格的影响方面没有重大差异。
低视力人群似乎更多地依赖句子中的空格信息，而正常视力人群似乎能更好地利用句子语境，且不受年龄影响。
