The Effect of Alternating-color Words on Reading and Eye Movements among Persian Language Learners

During the reading of naturally spaced texts such as English and Persian, readers are quite sensitive to space information. Recently, alternating text colors have shown certain benefits when the color alternation occurs in word boundary which shows that such color-based word boundary enhances perceptual grouping during reading among readers. The present study aimed to investigate eye-movement characteristics among native and L۲ readers of Persian when silently reading sentences with alternating-color words. A number of ۴۵ students including ۳۰ Iranian native Persian speakers and ۱۵ L۲ Persian learners participated in an eye-movement experiment. The results showed that presenting word boundary with alternating colors could significantly improve reading speed. In addition, it was observed that gaze duration was shorter in the word segment condition in comparison with the uniform color condition, and it was longer in the non-word segment condition.

کلیدواژه ها:

Alternating-color words ، Iranian L۲ readers ، fixation location ، word segmentation