The Age-Related Slowing in Bridging Inference Processing During Chinese Reading: An Eye-Tracking Study

This study employed an eye-tracking technique to examine the age-related slowing in bridging inference processing during Chinese reading and analyzed the data with LMEMs in R. The performances of 28 older adults and 32 younger adults were examined and compared on a reading task consisting of 30 pairs of three-sentence Chinese texts. All participants were instructed to read the short and then responded to comprehension questions that were either inference-primed or non-primed. The results showed that (1) all participants’ total reading time, regression path duration, and fixation count for the inference text were significantly greater than those for the control one, while response time (RT) to comprehension questions for the inference text was significantly shorter than that for the control one, which demonstrated that both older and younger participants were able to activate bridging inferences online; (2) older participants demonstrated significantly longer total reading time, longer regression path duration, more fixations, and slower responses to comprehension questions relative to younger participants, revealing age-related slowing in bridging inference processing during Chinese reading.