Age-related changes in eye movement behaviors during Chinese reading

Older readers often experience a decline in visual acuity, yet they possess greater reading experience and vocabulary knowledge. Early research in alphabetic scripts suggests that while older adults read more slowly, they often compensate by adopting a "risky" reading strategy. They make more guesses about upcoming words that lead to higher skipping rates, balanced by more regressions when those guesses prove wrong. Interestingly, recent work with Chinese older readers reveals a strikingly different pattern: they exhibit lower skipping and higher regression rates than younger readers. A possible driver for this cross-script discrepancy may be the high visual processing demand of the Chinese text, where characters are visually complex, and word boundaries are not explicitly marked. These may reduce older readers’ ability to extract parafoveal information, forcing them to rely more on bottom-up foveal input than top-down guessing in reading.

Building on this background, this presentation outlines a series of recent experiments investigating parafoveal processing in Chinese older readers. First, a moving-window experiment was used to estimate the perceptual span size. The results show that while older and younger readers have comparable overall span sizes, older readers are more sensitive to near-fovea information, such that their reading performance improved significantly more when the window expanded from 2 to 3 characters than from 3 to 4 characters. Second, a boundary paradigm experiment demonstrated that older readers can extract orthographic, phonological, and semantic information from the parafovea. However, the activation is slowed, with preview benefits emerging at a later stage of processing compared to younger readers. Finally, we tested whether providing explicit word boundary cues improves reading speed by encouraging a risky reading strategy. While the boundary cues facilitated reading speed, particularly for low-proficiency readers and words with high segmentation agreement, they did not affect skipping rates, and regression rates were actually reduced. Consequently, the adoption of a risky strategy does not appear to depend merely on the ease of targeting the next word through parafoveal processing. Together, these findings advance our understanding of how visual perceptual factors and reading experience interplay to determine parafoveal processing in reading.