Psychological Development and Education ›› 2026, Vol. 42 ›› Issue (5): 689-689.doi: 10.16187/j.cnki.issn1001-4918.2026.05.08

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Effects of Character Positional Probability in Young and Older Adults during Chinese Reading: Evidence from Eye Movements

CAO Haibo1, ZHAO Xiaojun1, LAN Zebo2, WANG Jingxin3   

  1. 1. College of Education, Hebei University, Baoding 071002;
    2. School of Health, Fujian Medical University, Fuzhou 350122;
    3. Faculty of Psychology, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin 300387
  • Published:2026-09-12

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Abstract: Two eye-tracking experiments examined the role of character positional probability in Chinese sentence reading among younger and older adults. Character positional probability refers to the likelihood that a specific Chinese character appears in the initial or final position of a two-character word, reflecting an implicit statistical regularity in Chinese reading. Results revealed a significant main effect of age group, with older adults demonstrating longer fixation durations on target words. There was also a main effect for initial character positional probability, but not for final character positional probability. Critically, significant interactions between age group and initial character probability were found in both gaze duration and total reading time. Specifically, older adults showed greater variation in fixation durations across probability conditions compared to younger adults. These findings indicate that character positional probability serves as a reliable linguistic cue for lexical identification and segmentation in Chinese, and that older adults exhibit heightened sensitivity to positional variations in characters.

Key words: character positional probability, word segmentation, aging, eye movements

CLC Number: 

  • G442
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