老年人汉语阅读中预测误差成本的产生机制

Understanding mechanisms of prediction error cost in Chinese reading for older adults

阅读的认知加工机制随年龄变老只发生了量变还是也产生了质变,是毕生发展研究领域的重要问题。要进行有效的语言处理,读者必须结合已有的经验知识和当前语境对即将出现的信息进行预测加工。因此,要解决上述问题就要回答老年人阅读中预测加工机制发生了怎样变化,即预测误差成本是如何产生的。研究拟采用眼动脑电同步记录技术,在自然阅读过程中实时获取语言处理的行为和神经指标,聚焦老年人预测误差成本的产生机制,主要从副中央凹视觉、工作记忆负荷及语言能力三方面解释预测误差成本产生的原因。研究成果对构建汉语阅读的毕生发展模型有重要意义。

An important question for research on reading across the lifespan concerns whether mechanisms of cognitive processing undergo only quantitative changes or also qualitative changes with aging. To process written language effectively, readers use their existing knowledge to make predictive inferences about linguistic information. As Older adults appear to rely more heavily on lexical prediction during reading. However, it is currently unknown whether, like young adults, they experience a processing cost due to predictive error, and whether the magnitude of this cost differs across age adult groups. Accordingly, the present research aims to understand the processing consequence of predictive error in both young and older adults. This will be achieved using novel co-registration methods that synchronize the recording of electroencephalographic(EEG) signals with eye movements. In particular, this approach will enable the analysis of fixated-related potentials(FRPs), which are averaged EEG waveforms time-locked to a fixation on a target word in a sentence during normal reading. Study 1 will manipulate the degree to which the prior linguistic constrains the probable identity of a word, to investigate age differences(young versus older adults)in predication error cost on word recognition in reading. Study 2, the parafoveal information availability,working memory load and the language ability will be manipulated to investigate the why the older adults produce prediction error cost. Study 3 will use linear mixed-effects modelling, and data-mining methods, to assess the effects of aging and these key individual differences variables on the effects of contextual constraint in reading(using data from Study 1 and 2). The findings from these studies will provide important insights into the nature of aging and individual difference effects on neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying word prediction in reading, and will form the basis for future models of these effects in Chinese reading.