McGowan Victoria A, Reichle Erik D
Department of Neuroscience, Psychology, & Behaviour, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK.
School of Psychology, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2018 Jan;71(1):179-189. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2017.1307424.
Eye-movement studies have demonstrated that, relative to college-aged readers, older readers of alphabetic languages like English and German tend to read more slowly, making more frequent and longer fixations and longer saccades, and skipping more words, but also making more frequent regressions. These findings have led to suggestions that older readers either adopt a "risky" strategy of using context to "guess" words as a way of compensating for slower rates of lexical processing, or have a smaller and more asymmetrical perceptual span. Unfortunately, neither of these hypotheses seemingly explains more recent observations that older readers of Chinese seem to adopt a more "conservative" strategy, making shorter saccades and skipping less often. In this paper, we use the model of eye-movement control to examine several possible accounts of the differences between college-aged and older readers of both alphabetic and non-alphabetic languages. These simulations re-confirm that the "risky" strategy may be sufficient to explain age-related differences in reader's eye movements, with older readers of English versus Chinese being, respectively, more versus less inclined to guess upcoming words. The implications of these results for aging, reading, and models of eye-movement control are discussed.
眼动研究表明，与大学生年龄的读者相比，像英语和德语这样的字母语言的老年读者往往阅读速度较慢，注视更频繁、持续时间更长，扫视更长，跳过的单词更多，但回视也更频繁。这些发现引发了一些观点，即老年读者要么采用一种“冒险”策略，利用上下文来“猜测”单词，以此来弥补词汇处理速度较慢的问题，要么具有更小且更不对称的感知跨度。不幸的是，这两种假设似乎都无法解释最近的观察结果，即中文老年读者似乎采用了一种更“保守”的策略，扫视更短且跳过的频率更低。在本文中，我们使用眼动控制模型来研究大学生年龄和老年读者在字母语言和非字母语言阅读上差异的几种可能解释。这些模拟再次证实，“冒险”策略可能足以解释读者眼动中与年龄相关的差异，英语老年读者与中文老年读者相比，分别更倾向和更不倾向于猜测即将出现的单词。讨论了这些结果对衰老、阅读和眼动控制模型的影响。
