Printing words in alternating colors facilitates eye movements among young and older Chinese adults

Jinger Pan; Aiping Wang; Mingsha Zhang; Yiu-Kei Tsang; Ming Yan

doi:10.3758/s13423-024-02581-6

Printing words in alternating colors facilitates eye movements among young and older Chinese adults

Psychon Bull Rev. 2024 Oct 7. doi: 10.3758/s13423-024-02581-6. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Jinger Pan¹, Aiping Wang², Mingsha Zhang³, Yiu-Kei Tsang^{4

5}, Ming Yan^{6

7}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology, The Education University of Hong Kong, Ting Kok, Hong Kong, China.
² Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
³ State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning and IDG, Division of Psychology, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
⁴ Department of Education Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China.
⁵ Centre for Learning Sciences, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China.
⁶ Department of Psychology, University of Macau, Macau, China. mingyan@um.edu.mo.
⁷ Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, University of Macau, Macau, China. mingyan@um.edu.mo.

PMID: 39375300
DOI: 10.3758/s13423-024-02581-6

Abstract

It is well known that the Chinese writing system lacks visual cues for word boundaries, such as interword spaces. However, characters must be grouped into words or phrases for understanding, and the lack of interword spaces can cause certain ambiguity. In the current study, young and older Chinese adults' eye movements were recorded during their reading of naturally unspaced sentences, where consecutive words or nonwords were printed using alternating colors. The eye movements of both the Chinese young and older adults were clearly influenced by this explicit word boundary information. Across a number of eye-movement measures, in addition to a general age-related slowdown, the results showed that both groups benefited overall from the explicit color-based word boundary and experienced interference from the nonword boundary. Moreover, the manipulations showed stronger effects among the older adults. We discuss implications for practical application.

Keywords: Aging; Chinese; Reading; Word boundary.