Eye movements of young and older adults during reading.
- 1 January 2007
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Psychological Association (APA) in Psychology and Aging
- Vol. 22 (1), 84-93
- https://doi.org/10.1037/0882-7974.22.1.84
Abstract
The eye movements of young and older adults were tracked as they read sentences varying in syntactic complexity. In Experiment 1, cleft object and object relative clause sentences were more difficult to process than cleft subject and subject relative clause sentences; however, older adults made many more regressions, resulting in increased regression path fixation times and total fixation times, than young adults while processing cleft object and object relative clause sentences. In Experiment 2, older adults experienced more difficulty than young adults while reading cleft and relative clause sentences with temporary syntactic ambiguities created by deleting the that complementizers. Regression analyses indicated that readers with smaller working memories need more regressions and longer fixation times to process cleft object and object relative clause sentences. These results suggest that age-associated declines in working memory do affect syntactic processing.Keywords
Funding Information
- National Institute on Aging (RO1 AG009952)
- University of Kansas
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