Revealing similarities in the perceptual span of young and older Chinese readers

Xie, F, Mcgowan, VA, Chang, M, Li, L, White, SJ, Paterson, KB, Wang, J and Warrington, KL ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3206-8002, 2020. Revealing similarities in the perceptual span of young and older Chinese readers. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 73 (8), pp. 1189-1205. ISSN 1747-0226

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Abstract

Older readers (aged 65+ years) of both alphabetic languages and character-based languages like Chinese read more slowly than their younger counterparts (aged 18–30 years). A possible explanation for this slowdown is that, due to age-related visual and cognitive declines, older readers have a smaller perceptual span and so acquire less information on each fixational pause. However, although aging effects on the perceptual span have been investigated for alphabetic languages, no such studies have been reported to date for character-based languages like Chinese. Accordingly, we investigated this issue in three experiments that used different gaze-contingent moving window paradigms to assess the perceptual span of young and older Chinese readers. In these experiments, text was shown either entirely as normal or normal only within a narrow region (window) comprising either the fixated word, the fixated word, and one word to its left, or the fixated word and either one or two words to its right. Characters outside these windows were replaced using a pattern mask (Experiment 1) or a visually similar character (Experiment 2), or blurred to render them unidentifiable (Experiment 3). Sentence reading times were overall longer for the older compared with the younger adults and differed systematically across display conditions. Crucially, however, the effects of display condition were essentially the same across the two age groups, indicating that the perceptual span for Chinese does not differ substantially for the older and young adults. We discuss these findings in relation to other evidence suggesting the perceptual span is preserved in older adulthood.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
Creators:	Xie, F., Mcgowan, V.A., Chang, M., Li, L., White, S.J., Paterson, K.B., Wang, J. and Warrington, K.L.
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
Date:	1 August 2020
Volume:	73
Number:	8
ISSN:	1747-0226
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1177/1747021819899826 DOI 1402397 Other
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Linda Sullivan
Date Added:	22 Jan 2021 12:25
Last Modified:	31 May 2021 15:07
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/42088

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