Increased predictability effects in older compared to younger adults have been mostly observed in late eye-movement measures during reading. However, it is unclear whether and how these effects may be related to verbal ability, which typically improves with age. Past studies have shown that verbal abilities modulate the predictability effect. Here, we aimed to replicate predictability effects in younger and older adults in a sentence reading paradigm and to investigate how verbal ability modulates the predictability effect. We monitored 26 younger and 27 older adults' eye movements as they read sentences with target words varying in predictability and examined the impact of age and verbal ability, as reflected in vocabulary and print exposure measures. Replicating previous studies, we found that older adults relied more heavily on contextual information in their anticipation of upcoming input in one late measure. In one early measure (first-fixation duration), participants with higher scores in verbal ability showed greater predictability effects, whereas the predictability effect was virtually absent in those with low scores. In one late measure (regression-path duration), age interacted with predictability. However, verbal ability, when included as a covariate in this model, could not account for the age-related increases in predictability effects. Collectively, our findings indicate that verbal ability influences predictability effects in early processing stages, suggesting facilitation of initial word processing and that some aspect of aging other than verbal ability influences predictability effects in late measures. The latter finding most likely reflects a shift toward integrative controlled processes with age. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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年龄和语言能力对阅读单词预测能力的影响。

与年轻人相比，老年人增加的可预测性影响主要在阅读期间的晚期眼动测量中观察到。然而，尚不清楚这些影响是否以及如何与语言能力相关，而语言能力通常会随着年龄的增长而提高。过去的研究表明，语言能力会调节可预测性效应。在这里，我们旨在在句子阅读范式中复制年轻人和老年人的可预测性效应，并研究语言能力如何调节可预测性效应。我们监测了 26 名年轻人和 27 名老年人在阅读具有可预测性不同的目标词的句子时的眼球运动，并检查了年龄和语言能力的影响，这反映在词汇和印刷品暴露措施中。复制以前的研究，我们发现，老年人在预测一项较晚的措施中即将到来的输入时更依赖于上下文信息。在一项早期测量（第一次注视持续时间）中，语言能力得分较高的参与者表现出更大的可预测性效应，而在低得分者中几乎不存在可预测性效应。在一项后期测量（回归路径持续时间）中，年龄与可预测性相互作用。然而，当语言能力作为协变量包含在该模型中时，无法解释与年龄相关的可预测性影响的增加。总的来说，我们的研究结果表明语言能力影响早期加工阶段的可预测性效应，这表明初始文字加工的便利化以及语言能力以外的衰老的某些方面影响后期测量的可预测性效应。后一个发现很可能反映了随着年龄的增长而向综合控制过程的转变。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2021 APA，保留所有权利）。