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Efficient Word Segmentation is Preserved in Older Adult Readers: Evidence from Eye Movements during Chinese Reading.

journal contribution
posted on 2024-02-26, 11:02 authored by Lin Li, Lingshan Bao, Zhuoer Li, Sha Li, Jingyi Liu, Ping Wang, Kayleigh Warrington, Sarah Gunn, Kevin PatersonKevin Paterson

College-aged readers use efficient strategies to segment and recognize words in naturally unspaced Chinese text. Whether this capability changes across the adult lifespan is unknown, although segmenting words in unspaced text may be challenging for older readers due to visual and cognitive declines in older age, including poorer parafoveal processing of upcoming characters. Accordingly, we conducted two eye movement experiments to test for age differences in word segmentation, each with 48 young (18–30 years) and 36 older (65+ years) native Chinese readers. Following Zhou and Li (2021), we focused on the processing of “incremental” three-character words, like 幼儿园 (meaning “kindergartens”), which contain an embedded two-character word (e.g., 幼儿, meaning “children”). In Experiment 1, either the three-character word or its embedded word was presented as the target word in sentence contexts where the three-character word always was plausible, and the embedded word was either plausible or implausible. Both age groups produced similar plausibility effects, suggesting age constancy in accessing the embedded word early during ambiguity processing before ultimately assigning an incremental word analysis. Experiment 2 provided further evidence that both younger and older readers access the embedded word early during ambiguity processing, but rapidly select the appropriate (incremental) word. Crucially, the findings suggest that word segmentation strategies do not differ with age. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)

History

Author affiliation

College of Life Sciences/Psychology & Vision Sciences

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Published in

Psychology and Aging

Volume

39

Issue

3

Pagination

215-230

Publisher

American Psychological Association

issn

0882-7974

Copyright date

2024

Available date

2025-05-01

Language

en

Deposited by

Professor Kevin Paterson

Deposit date

2024-02-20

Data Access Statement

Datasets and analytic code for analyses in R, and the sentence stimuli for the present experiments (Li et al., 2023) are available via the University of Leicester Figshare repository: https://figshare.com/s/ead1b39103dde4f91aa8

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