语言学院沙龙系列讲座之心理语言学

题  目：Eye Movements in Reading for Older and Younger Readers

主讲人：杨锦绵 （美国加州大学圣地亚哥分校心理系）

时  间： 2013年5月17日（星期五）15:00-16:30

地  点： 上海外国语大学语言研究院会议室（虹口校区5号楼602室）

主办单位： 上外语言研究院

讲座内容简介：

Older readers read more slowly than younger readers. However, it is still unclear about the aging effects in eye movements and the underlying mechanism of these effects. In this talk, I will introduce three experiments with different experimental paradigms examining these effects.

In the first experiment, the size of the perceptual span (or the span of effective vision) in older readers was examined with the moving window paradigm (McConkie & Rayner, 1975). The results show that older readers have a smaller and more symmetric span than that of younger readers. These characteristics of older readers can be attributed to their less efficient processing of nonfoveal information, which results in a riskier reading strategy.

In the second experiment, the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) was used to present either a valid or an invalid parafoveal preview of a target word. During the saccade to the target word, the preview word changed to the target word. For early measures of processing time (first fixation duration and single fixation duration), the standard preview benefit effect (shorter fixation times on the target word with a valid preview than an invalid preview) was obtained for both older and younger readers. However, for gaze duration and go-past time, the preview benefit was somewhat attenuated in the older readers in comparison to the younger readers, suggesting that on some fixations older readers obtain less preview benefit from the word to the right of fixation.

The third experiment investigated whether older readers’ slower reading is due to less efficient parafoveal information processing, or less efficient processing of both foveal and parafoveal information. While older and younger readers both found reading quite difficult when the fixated word was masked, the foveal mask increased sentence reading time over threefold (3.4) for the older readers (in comparison to the control condition in which the sentence was presented normally) compared to younger readers who took 1.3 times longer to read sentences in the foveal mask condition (in comparison to the control condition). Moreover, the results also suggest that older readers do not process parafoveal information as efficiently as younger readers.

In sum, these results (older readers have a smaller perception span, obtain less preview benefit and are less efficient in processing both foveal and parafoveal information) are consistent with the explanation that there is an age-related general cognitive slowing in visual information processing (e.g. Salthouse, 1996).

主讲人简介：

杨锦绵，华南师范大学心理系硕士（导师王穗苹教授），美国麻州大学安城分校（University of Massachusetts, Amherst）心理系博士（导师Keith Rayner教授），加州大学圣地亚哥分校心理系博士后。研究方向为阅读中的眼动效应，包括影响词汇识别的因素，汉语的句法、语义加工，中英文预视效应的机制，老年人，聋人，失语症病人的阅读行为研究，以及用ERP的方法检测眼动研究中发现的阅读效应。在Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance、Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition、Psychology and Aging; Memory and Cognition、Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics、Language and Cognitive Processes、Visual Cognition、Journal of Research in Reading、 Reading & Writing、《心理学报》、《心理科学》等国际和国内学刊上发表论文二十余篇。2012年1月受亚利桑那大学Gayle Dede博士的聘请，作为研究顾问，培训其实验室人员收集、处理包括老年人等特殊人群的眼动数据。