Liu Zhiwei, Li Yan, Wang Jingxin
School of Education and Psychological Science, Sichuan University of Science and Engineering, Zigong, Sichuan, China.
Academy of Psychology and Behavior, Faculty of Psychology, Tianjin Normal University, Hexi District, Tianjin, 330374, China.
BMC Psychol. 2025 May 6;13(1):469. doi: 10.1186/s40359-025-02750-9.
Recent research has highlighted a growing interest in word position coding during sentence reading, with young adults demonstrating flexible encoding of word positions. However, normal aging is associated with the visual and cognitive changes, which may impact this flexibility - particularly in Chinese reading, where word boundaries are not explicitly marked. This study examined age-related differences in the flexibility of word position encoding by investigating the transposed-word effect in young and older adults. Participants read sentences containing transposed words and control sentences while performing a rapid grammaticality decision task. Both age groups exhibited the transposed-word effect, with longer response times and higher error rates in the transposed-word condition compared to the control condition, indicating that the flexibility of word position coding is preserved across adulthood. Crucially, young adults showed a more pronounced transposed-word effect than older adults, suggesting an age-related reduction in the flexibility of word position coding. These findings suggest that while the flexibility of word position coding is preserved across adulthood, older adults display reduced flexibility compared to young adults in Chinese reading.
最近的研究突出了在句子阅读过程中对单词位置编码的兴趣日益增长，年轻人表现出对单词位置的灵活编码。然而，正常衰老与视觉和认知变化相关，这可能会影响这种灵活性——尤其是在中文阅读中，单词边界没有明确标记。本研究通过调查年轻人和老年人中的换位词效应，检验了单词位置编码灵活性的年龄相关差异。参与者在执行快速语法判断任务时阅读包含换位词的句子和对照句子。两个年龄组都表现出换位词效应，与对照条件相比，换位词条件下的反应时间更长，错误率更高，表明单词位置编码的灵活性在成年期得以保留。至关重要的是，年轻人表现出比老年人更明显的换位词效应，这表明单词位置编码的灵活性存在与年龄相关的降低。这些发现表明，虽然单词位置编码的灵活性在成年期得以保留，但在中文阅读中，老年人与年轻人相比表现出灵活性降低。
