Sensitivity to linguistic difficulty during reading: Evidence from the eye movements of young and older adults

This thesis reports three eye-tracking experiments which examine whether young (aged 18 – 30 years) and older adult readers (aged 65+ years) differ in aspects of linguistic processing. It is well established that the linguistic properties of words influence the ease by which they are processed. However, less is known about how the complexities of age impact this. Experiment 1 found that some grammatical errors in text were detected at a lesser rate for older compared to young readers. Importantly however, these effects were not caused by differences in word skipping patterns. Experiment 2 found that young and older adult readers are both equally disrupted by unfamiliar phrase orders (e.g. “chips and fish”), despite older readers having more experience of phrases in their expected configuration (e.g. “fish and chips”). This finding suggests that phrasal order does become fixed in memory storage systems, but that these associations are not further strengthened by language experience. Experiment 3 found that older adults experience age-related difficulties when reading in silence. Surprisingly however, effects of background noise from disruptive speech sounds did not affect processing at the level of individual words for older readers.

The results from these experiments are in line with research that suggests older adults adapt to age-related sensory and cognitive changes by adopting less cautious reading strategies. Ultimately, the empirical work presented suggests that linguistic difficulty in text does not produce catastrophic effects on language processing for older adults.