Adult age differences in effects of text spacing on eye movements during reading

Li, S, Oliver-Mighten, L, Li, L, White, SJ, Paterson, KB, Wang, J, Warrington, KL ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3206-8002 and McGowan, VA, 2019. Adult age differences in effects of text spacing on eye movements during reading. Frontiers in Psychology, 9: 2700.

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Abstract

Large-scale changes in text spacing, such as removing the spaces between words, disrupt reading more for older (65+ years) than younger (18-30 years) adults. However, it is unknown whether older readers show greater sensitivity to simultaneous subtle changes in inter-letter and inter-word spacing encountered in everyday reading. To investigate this, we recorded young and older adults' eye movements while reading sentences in which inter-letter and inter-word spacing was normal, condensed (10 and 20% smaller than normal), or expanded (10 or 20% larger than normal). Each sentence included either a high or low frequency target word, matched for length and contextual predictability. Condensing but not expanding text spacing disrupted reading more for the older adults. Moreover, word frequency effects (the reading time cost for low compared to high frequency words) were larger for the older adults, consistent with aging effects on lexical processing in previous research. However, this age difference in the word frequency effect did not vary across spacing conditions, suggesting spacing did not further disrupt older readers' lexical processing. We conclude that visual rather than lexical processing is disrupted more for older readers when text spacing is condensed and discuss this finding in relation to common age-related visual deficits.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Frontiers in Psychology
Creators:	Li, S., Oliver-Mighten, L., Li, L., White, S.J., Paterson, K.B., Wang, J., Warrington, K.L. and McGowan, V.A.
Publisher:	Frontiers Media SA
Date:	8 January 2019
Volume:	9
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02700 DOI 1402306 Other
Rights:	Copyright © 2019 Li, Oliver-Mighten, Li, White, Paterson, Wang, Warrington and McGowan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Linda Sullivan
Date Added:	22 Jan 2021 10:21
Last Modified:	31 May 2021 15:07
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/42084

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