Abstract

The cognitive ability of older adults declines with age, while the language processing experience becomes more abundant. Word recognition is one of the most fundamental abilities in language processing, but how the interaction of cognitive aging and language experience affects word recognition in older adults is still a complex issue. This study focuses on the influence of two factors, age of acquisition (AoA) and parts of speech on Chinese word recognition in older adults. In Experiment 1, we employed a context-free lexical decisions task to compare the differences of word recognition between young and older adults at the conditions of different AoAs and parts of speech. In Experiment 2, participants were required to perform a sentence reading task in order to examine the above effects with contextual involvement, and their eye movements were tracked and analyzed. Combining the results of the two experiments, we found a greater AoA effect in older adults compared to young adults. This effect primarily manifested as a decline in processing efficiency for late-acquired words and was already evident in the early stage of word recognition. In addition, only the older adults exhibit differences in the processing of distinct word components, indicating a progressive pattern of increasing difficulty from nouns to verbs and subsequently to adjectives. The findings suggest that older adults experience a heightened exacerbation of word processing difficulties.

中文翻译：

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跨不同迎角和词性的与年龄相关的中文单词识别

摘要

老年人的认知能力随着年龄的增长而下降，而语言处理经验却变得更加丰富。文字识别是语言处理中最基本的能力之一，但认知老化和语言体验的相互作用如何影响老年人的文字识别仍然是一个复杂的问题。本研究重点关注习得年龄（AoA）和词类两个因素对老年人汉语单词识别的影响。在实验1中，我们采用了上下文无关的词汇决策任务来比较年轻人和老年人在不同攻击角和词性条件下的单词识别差异。在实验2中，参与者被要求执行句子阅读任务，以检查上述与上下文相关的效果，并跟踪和分析他们的眼球运动。结合这两个实验的结果，我们发现与年轻人相比，老年人的迎角效应更大。这种效应主要表现为对晚习得词的处理效率下降，并且在词识别的早期阶段就已经很明显了。此外，只有老年人在处理不同单词成分时表现出差异，表明从名词到动词，然后到形容词的难度逐渐增加的模式。研究结果表明，老年人的文字处理困难更加严重。