Effect of alternating-color words on oral reading in grades 2–5 Chinese children: evidence from eye movements

Song, Ziming; Liu, Xiaowei; Wang, Yongsheng; Yan, Guoli

doi:10.1007/s11145-021-10164-3

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…This points to a more general mechanism for oculomotor control during reading, rather than one that is specifically developed to use between-word spacing. Importantly, our finding fits with prior research showing that in the absence of between-word spacing, an alternating bold condition (Perea & Acha, 2009) and an alternating colour condition (Perea et al, 2015a;Song et al, 2021;Zhou et al, 2020) facilitates sentence reading. Thus, the use of betweenword spacing to guide eye movements during reading can be replaced by the use of alternative physical cues for word segmentation.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Effects of alternating letter case on processing sequences of written words

Fournet

Mirault

Perea

et al. 2023

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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In three grammatical decision experiments we examined the impact of alternating letter case on sentence reading. Experiments 1 and 2 compared grammatical decision responses (“Is this a grammatically correct sequence of words or not?”) in three different conditions: 1) SAME CASE / same case; 2) alternating CASE between WORDS; 3) aLterNaTing cAsE wItHin WoRdS. For the grammatically correct sequences, we observed significantly faster responses in the same case conditions compared with the between-word case manipulation, as well as a significant advantage for the between-word condition compared with within-word alternating case. These results confirm that case-alternation deteriorates sentence reading, but more so at the level of single word processing (within-word alternation) than at the sentence level (between-word alternation). Experiment 3 demonstrated that between-word case alternation facilitates sentence processing compared with an all-lowercase condition when betweenWORDspacesAREremoved. Therefore, in the absence of between-word spacing, case changes across words facilitate sentence processing, possibly by guiding readers’ eyes to optimal locations for word identification.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Effects of alternating letter case on processing sequences of written words

Fournet

Mirault

Perea

et al. 2023

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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“…In the case of Chinese, the introduction of inter‐word spaces has been shown to help children form stronger connections between characters and words, thereby supporting the more rapid and accurate learning of new vocabulary 46 . There is also evidence suggesting that explicit word boundary information provided by alternating the font color of words can enhance both silent and oral reading for Chinese beginners 47–49 . In addition, in the case of second language learners, the insertion of spaces between words reduces the uncertainty about the characters that constitute a word, thereby improving word identification and reading speed 50 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…46 There is also evidence suggesting that explicit word boundary information provided by alternating the font color of words can enhance both silent and oral reading for Chinese beginners. [47][48][49] In addition, in the case of second language learners, the insertion of spaces between words reduces the uncertainty about the characters that constitute a word, thereby improving word identification and reading speed. 50 Finally, it is worth noting that with the partially demarcated Thai script, children start learning to read text with inter-word spaces in kindergarten and first grade, only transitioning to text without spaces in second grade.…”

Section: F I G U R Ementioning

confidence: 99%

Comparative analyses of the information content of letters, characters, and inter‐word spaces across writing systems

Huang,

Reichle,

2024

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

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One difference among writing systems is how orthographic cues are used to demarcate words; although most alphabetic scripts use inter‐word spaces, some Asian scripts do not explicitly mark word boundaries (e.g., Chinese). It is unclear whether these differences are arbitrary or whether they are designed to maximize reading efficiency. Here, we show that spaces inserted between words in non‐demarcated scripts provide less information about word boundaries than spaces in demarcated scripts. Furthermore, despite the fact that less information is contained by inter‐word spaces than characters/letters of the same size, the information content of inter‐word spaces in demarcated scripts is closer to that of characters/letters compared to the information content of inter‐word spaces that are inserted in non‐demarcated scripts. These results suggest that the conventions used to demarcate word boundaries are sufficient to support efficient reading. Our findings provide new insights into the universals and variation across writing systems and shed light on the mental processes that support skilled reading.

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“…While alternating colours at word boundaries increased the reading fluency of skilled Chinese readers when reading aloud difficult, technical texts with unfamiliar words ( Perea & Wang, 2017 ), the same effect was not found under normal circumstances, that is, when reading more common texts with familiar words ( Perea & Wang, 2017 ). In fact, it seems that the positive impact of colour segmentation on reading speed decreases with age: in an eye-tracking study, Song et al (2021) found colour facilitation effects in multi-chromatic compared with mono-chromatic sentence-processing in Grades 2–3 children (as did Perea & Wang, 2017 , Experiment 3), but not in Grades 4–5 children.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 98%

The role of syllables and morphemes in silent reading: An eye-tracking study

Simone

Moll

Feldmann

et al. 2023

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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German skilled readers have been found to engage in morphological and syllable-based processing in visual word recognition. However, the relative reliance on syllables and morphemes in reading multi-syllabic complex words is still unresolved. The present study aimed to unveil which of these sub-lexical units are the preferred units of reading by employing eye-tracking technology. Participants silently read sentences while their eye movements were recorded. Words were visually marked by the use of color alternation (Experiment 1) or hyphenation (Experiment 2), either at syllable boundary (e.g., Kir-schen), at morpheme boundary (e.g., Kirsch-en) or within the units themselves (e.g., Ki-rschen). A control condition without disruptions was used as a baseline (e.g., Kirschen). The results of Experiment 1 showed that eye-movements were not modulated by color alternations. The results of Experiment 2 indicated that hyphens disrupting syllables had a larger inhibitory effect on reading times than hyphens disrupting morphemes, suggesting that eye-movements in German skilled readers are more influenced by syllablic than morphological structure.

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Effect of alternating-color words on oral reading in grades 2–5 Chinese children: evidence from eye movements

Cited by 8 publications

References 30 publications

Effects of alternating letter case on processing sequences of written words

Effects of alternating letter case on processing sequences of written words

Comparative analyses of the information content of letters, characters, and inter‐word spaces across writing systems

The role of syllables and morphemes in silent reading: An eye-tracking study

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