Researchers investigate the reading habits of children and adults

Submitted by Judy Hanning on Tue, 2017-01-24 02:00
Researchers in Berlin working for the Max Planck Institute for Human Development have recently completed a study of variations in reading level due to age and experience. The research covered a wide variety of age ranges; the youngest participants were in first grade, while the oldest participants were over 70 years old.

This discusses a study performed that observed the reading abilities of a group of people between the age of 7 and 70. This is important because a study like this has never been done before and can shed light on the differences between age groups and how they retain knowledge.

The scientists concluded that older readers are more experienced with the use of their given language. This experience allows aged readers to recognize less common words more readily than their younger counterparts. Furthermore, older participants were able to differentiate between similar sounding and similar appearing words more rapidly than younger readers.
Researchers are focusing on three different characteristics of a word: its length, its frequency of use within the language, and how similar it is to other words. They have discovered that both length and frequency are used less and less to read a word over the course of life.
~ Medical XPress

Key Takeaways:

1
A study of how words are used by different age demographics.
2
A large scale project called ERIC should improve learning methods.
3
Recognizing and understanding words.
Read the full article here:
http://www.readingrockets.org/news/researchers-investigate-reading-habits-children-and-adults