Davies Rob A I, Arnell Ruth, Birchenough Julia M H, Grimmond Debbie, Houlson Sam
Department of Psychology, Lancaster University.
Department of Education, Exeter University.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2017 Aug;43(8):1298-1338. doi: 10.1037/xlm0000366. Epub 2017 Mar 20.
The effects of psycholinguistic variables are critical to the evaluation of theories about the cognitive reading system. However, reading research has tended to focus on the impact of key variables on average performance. We report the first investigation examining variation in psycholinguistic effects across the life span, from childhood into old age. We analyzed the performance of a sample of 535 readers, aged 8-83 years in lexical decision and pronunciation tasks. Our findings show that the effects on reading of two key variables, frequency and AoA, decrease in size with increasing age over the life span. We observed the systematic modulation by age and reading ability of these and other psycholinguistic effects alongside a global U-shaped effect of age. Diffusion model analyses suggest that developmental speed-up in decision responses can be attributed to the increasing quality of evidence accumulation in reaction to words, while the ageing-related slowing can be attributed to decreasing efficiency of stimulus encoding or response execution processes. An analysis of spoken response durations furnishes a consistent picture in which the slowing of pronunciation responses with age can be attributed to slowing articulatory processes. We think our findings can be explained by theoretical accounts that incorporate learning as the basis for the development of structure in the reading system. However, an adequate theory shall have to include assumptions about both developmental learning and later ageing. Our results warrant a life span theory of reading. (PsycINFO Database Record
心理语言学变量的影响对于评估有关认知阅读系统的理论至关重要。然而，阅读研究往往侧重于关键变量对平均表现的影响。我们报告了第一项考察从童年到老年整个生命周期中心理语言学效应变化的研究。我们分析了535名年龄在8至83岁之间的读者在词汇判断和发音任务中的表现。我们的研究结果表明，两个关键变量（词频和词龄）对阅读的影响在整个生命周期中会随着年龄的增长而减小。我们观察到这些及其他心理语言学效应会受到年龄和阅读能力的系统性调节，同时还存在年龄的整体U型效应。扩散模型分析表明，决策反应的发展加速可归因于对单词反应时证据积累质量的提高，而与衰老相关的反应减慢可归因于刺激编码或反应执行过程效率的降低。对口语反应时长的分析提供了一个一致的情况，即发音反应随年龄增长而减慢可归因于发音过程的减慢。我们认为我们的研究结果可以用将学习作为阅读系统结构发展基础的理论解释。然而，一个充分的理论必须包括关于发展性学习和后期衰老的假设。我们的研究结果为阅读的生命周期理论提供了依据。（PsycINFO数据库记录）
