Flexible parafoveal processing of character order is preserved in older readers

Eye movement research in Chinese shows that young adults encode character order flexibly during parafoveal processing and that word predictability can influence this early processing stage. Whether these effects change in older age is unclear, although other research suggests older readers have reduced parafoveal processing capabilities. Using the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975), we compared eye movement data from 60 young adults (18–30 years) with new data from 36 older adults (65–75 years). Participants read sentences with two-character target words of high or low predictability. Before their gaze crossed an invisible boundary, target words were presented normally (valid preview) or with characters transposed or replaced by unrelated characters (invalid previews). Previews reverted to normal once their gaze crossed the boundary. Our results reveal a larger word predictability effect for the older readers, while transposed-character effects were similar across groups, suggesting this intriguing aspect of parafoveal processing is preserved in aging readers.