The Validity Of Color Marking In Word Segmentation During Chinese Reading

Chinese text is no spaces between words,so readers don't have clear word boundary when they read the text,which makes them rely on their existing reading skills to segment words.In recent years,researchers have studied whether readers can benefit from the word spaces by recording the eye trajectory of the readers when reading the space text.It turns out that the space between words promotes the word recognition of the readers to a certain extent.However,the addition of spaces between words as a clue to segment words make the text difference in spatial distribution,which leads to reading cost and reduces the potential benefits of parafoveal-on-foveal effect.Therefore,it is necessary to find a cue that helps readers to read without reading cost.Researchers examined whether color can be used as a visual cue to help readers to read Chinese text by adding red-green mark into Spanish.The study found that color can segment words effectively when there is no spaces in Spanish.However,Spanish is a kind of alphabetic writing systems,which means the conclusion of this language can't be extended to Chinese text.Whether Chinese can benefit from color as a visual cue has to be studied.In this study,we manipulated the word frequency when examining the effect of color in Chinese text.The purpose of this study to manipulate word frequency was to examine whether the color that marking sentences in different ways would be influenced by the difficulty of lexical processing.In the experiment,54 college students were selected as subjects.And it was designed as 2(word frequency:high frequency,low frequency)x 4(marking mode:normal condition,alternating color that marking each character,alternating color that marking words,alternating color that marking non-words).The Eyelink II eyetracker was used to records the eye movement of the subjects to examine the effect of color on the word segmentation during Chinese reading.By analyzing the experimental results,the main conclusions of this study are as follows:(1)In Chinese reading process,the color mark is a relatively effective visual word segmentation cue.Although there is no significant difference between alternating color that marking words and alternating color that marking each character,and alternating color that marking non-words does interfere with the Chinese reader's reading.It shows that there is some psychological reality in Chinese reading.(2)The role of color markers during word recognition process is not affected by word frequency,which indicates that the role of color markers only occurs in the visual information processing stage of words recognition.