Parafoveal Processing of Orthography, Phonology, and Semantics during Chinese Reading: Effects of Foveal Load.

The foveal load hypothesis assumes that the ease (or difficulty) of processing the currently fixated word in a sentence can influence processing of the upcoming word(s), such that parafoveal preview is reduced when foveal load is high. Recent investigations using pseudo-character previews reported an absence of foveal load effects in Chinese reading. Substantial Chinese studies to date provide some evidence to show that parafoveal words may be processed orthographically, phonologically, or semantically.

Efficient word segmentation is preserved in older adult readers: Evidence from eye movements during Chinese reading.

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.

Ten simple rules for implementing open and reproducible research practices after attending a training course.

Open, reproducible, and replicable research practices are a fundamental part of science. Training is often organized on a grassroots level, offered by early career researchers, for early career researchers. Buffet style courses that cover many topics can inspire participants to try new things; however, they can also be overwhelming.

Insights Into the Processing of Collocations During L2 English Reading: Evidence From Eye Movements.

We report an eye movement experiment that investigates the effects of collocation strength and contextual predictability on the reading of collocative phrases by L2 English readers. Thirty-eight Chinese English as foreign language learners (EFL) read 40 sentences, each including a specific two-word phrase that was either a strong (e.g.

Are older adults more risky readers? Evidence from meta-analysis.

According to an influential account of aging effects on reading, older adults (65+ years) employ a more "risky" reading strategy compared to young adults (18-30 years), in which they attempt to compensate for slower processing by using lexical and contextual knowledge to guess upcoming (i.e., parafoveal) words more often.

Adult age differences in parafoveal preview effects during reading: Evidence from Chinese.

We investigated parafoveal processing by 44 young (18-30 years) and 44 older (65+ years) Chinese readers using eye movement measures. Participants read sentences which included an invisible boundary after a two-character word (N) and before two one-character words (N + 1, N + 2). Before a reader's gaze crossed the boundary, N + 1 and N + 2 were shown normally or masked (i.

Effects of word predictability on eye movements during Arabic reading.

Contextual predictability influences both the probability and duration of eye fixations on words when reading Latinate alphabetic scripts like English and German. However, it is unknown whether word predictability influences eye movements in reading similarly for Semitic languages like Arabic, which are alphabetic languages with very different visual and linguistic characteristics. Such knowledge is nevertheless important for establishing the generality of mechanisms of eye-movement control across different alphabetic writing systems.

Perceptual span is independent of font size for older and young readers: Evidence from Chinese.

Research suggests that visual acuity plays a more important role in parafoveal processing in Chinese reading than in spaced alphabetic languages, such that in Chinese, as the font size increases, the size of the perceptual span decreases. The lack of spaces and the complexity of written Chinese may make characters in eccentric positions particularly hard to process. Older adults generally have poorer visual capabilities than young adults, particularly in parafoveal vision, and so may find large characters in the parafovea particularly hard to process compared with smaller characters because of their greater eccentricity.

Effects of Normative Aging on Eye Movements during Reading.

Substantial progress has been made in understanding the mostly detrimental effects of normative aging on eye movements during reading. This article provides a review of research on aging effects on eye movements during reading for different writing systems (i.e.

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

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.

Flexibility in the perceptual span during reading: Evidence from Mongolian.

Readers can acquire useful information from only a narrow region of text around each fixation (the perceptual span), which extends asymmetrically in the direction of reading. Studies with bilingual readers have additionally shown that this asymmetry reverses with changes in horizontal reading direction. However, little is known about the perceptual span's flexibility following orthogonal (vertical vs.

Aging and Pattern Complexity Effects on the Visual Span: Evidence from Chinese Character Recognition.

Research suggests that pattern complexity (number of strokes) limits the visual span for Chinese characters, and that this may have important consequences for reading. With the present research, we investigated age differences in the visual span for Chinese characters by presenting trigrams of low, medium or high complexity at various locations relative to a central point to young (18-30 years) and older (60+ years) adults. A sentence reading task was used to assess their reading speed.

Aging Effects on the Visual Span for Alphabetic Stimuli.

: The visual span (i.e., an estimate of the number of letters that can be recognized reliably on a single glance) is widely considered to impose an important sensory limitation on reading speed.

Effects of adult aging on letter position coding in reading: Evidence from eye movements.

It is well-established that young adults encode letter position flexibly during natural reading. However, given the visual changes that occur with normal aging, it is important to establish whether letter position coding is equivalent across adulthood. In 2 experiments, young (18-25 years) and older (65+ years) adults' were recorded while reading sentences with words containing transposed adjacent letters.

Adult Age Differences in Effects of Text Spacing on Eye Movements During Reading.

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).

Effects of aging, word frequency, and text stimulus quality on reading across the adult lifespan: Evidence from eye movements.

Reductions in stimulus quality may disrupt the reading performance of older adults more when compared with young adults because of sensory declines that begin early in middle age. However, few studies have investigated adult age differences in the effects of stimulus quality on reading, and none have examined how this affects lexical processing and eye movement control. Accordingly, we report two experiments that examine the effects of reduced stimulus quality on the eye movements of young (18-24 years), middle-aged (41-51 years), and older (65+ years) adult readers.

Ageing and the misperception of words: Evidence from eye movements during reading.

Research with lexical neighbours (words that differ by a single letter while the number and order of letters are preserved) indicates that readers frequently misperceive a word as its higher frequency neighbour (HFN) even during normal reading. But how this lexical influence on word identification changes across the adult lifespan is largely unknown, although slower lexical processing and reduced visual abilities in later adulthood may lead to an increased incidence of word misperception errors. In particular, older adults may be more likely than younger adults to misidentify a word as its HFN, especially when the HFN is congruent with prior sentence context, although this has not been investigated.

Eye movements during reading and topic scanning: effects of word frequency.

The study examined the nature of eye movement control and word recognition during scanning for a specific topic, compared with reading for comprehension. Experimental trials included a manipulation of word frequency: the critical word was frequent (and orthographically familiar) or infrequent (2 conditions: orthographically familiar and orthographically unfamiliar). First-pass reading times showed effects of word frequency for both reading and scanning, with no interactions between word characteristics and task.