Wang Zhiyun, Zhang Qingfang
Department of Psychology, Renmin University of China, 59 Zhongguancun Street, Haidian District, Beijing, 100872, People's Republic of China.
Psychol Res. 2024 Mar;88(2):652-669. doi: 10.1007/s00426-023-01861-5. Epub 2023 Aug 10.
This study used an image-description paradigm with concurrent eye movement recordings to investigate differences of grammatical advance planning between young and older speakers in spoken sentence production. Participants were asked to produce sentences with simple or complex initial phrase structures (IPS) in Experiment 1 while producing individual words in Experiment 2. Young and older speakers showed comparable speaking latencies in sentence production task, whereas older speakers showed longer latencies than young speakers in word production task. Eye movement data showed that compared with young speakers, older speakers had higher fixation percentage on object 1, lower percentage of gaze shift from object 1 to 2, and lower fixation percentage on object 2 in simple IPS sentences, while they showed similar fixation percentage on object 1, similar percentage of gaze shift from object 1 to 2, and lower fixation percentage on object 2 in complex IPS sentences, indicating a decline of grammatical encoding scope presenting on eye movement patterns. Meanwhile, speech analysis showed that older speakers presented longer utterance duration, slower speech rate, and longer and more frequently occurred pauses in articulation, indicating a decline of speech articulation in older speakers. Thus, our study suggests that older speakers experience an ageing effect in the sentences with complex initial phrases due to limited cognitive resources.
本研究采用图像描述范式并同步记录眼动，以探究年轻和年长说话者在口语句子生成中语法预先规划的差异。在实验1中，要求参与者生成具有简单或复杂起始短语结构（IPS）的句子，而在实验2中要求生成单个单词。年轻和年长说话者在句子生成任务中的说话延迟相当，而在单词生成任务中，年长说话者的延迟比年轻说话者更长。眼动数据显示，与年轻说话者相比，年长说话者在简单IPS句子中对物体1的注视百分比更高，从物体1转移到物体2的注视转移百分比更低，对物体2的注视百分比更低，而在复杂IPS句子中，他们对物体1的注视百分比相似，从物体1转移到物体2的注视转移百分比相似，对物体2的注视百分比更低，这表明在眼动模式中存在语法编码范围的下降。同时，语音分析表明，年长说话者的话语持续时间更长，语速更慢，发音停顿更长且更频繁，这表明年长说话者的言语表达能力下降。因此，我们的研究表明，由于认知资源有限，年长说话者在具有复杂起始短语的句子中会经历衰老效应。
