Does word boundary information facilitate Chinese sentence reading in children as beginning readers?

Background

Previous studies showed inconsistent results on whether providing word boundary information using spaces or alternating colors across words would facilitate children's Chinese reading performance.

Aims

We speculated that this inconsistency was related to individual difference in the ability to adjust visual routines for reading established through prior experience in response to the word boundary information. We hypothesized that (1) children who had greater ability to change eye movement behavior according to the word boundary manipulation would benefit more in reading performance; (2) using spaces as word boundaries changed the global configuration of original sentences, which may require more adjustment from the established visual routine, leading to less facilitation.

Samples

Sixty-three grade 2–3 primary school children.

Methods

Children read regular Chinese sentences and sentences with either spaces or alternating colors as word boundary markers and answered related comprehension questions with eye tracking.

Results

Eye Movement analysis with Hidden Markov Models (EMHMM) revealed two representative gaze transition patterns through clustering: a more sequential and a less sequential pattern. As compared with regular sentences, when using alternating colors as word boundary markers, a larger gaze transition pattern change towards the more sequential pattern was correlated with a larger increase in comprehension accuracy. This effect was not observed when using spaces as word boundary markers.

Conclusions

An instructional design should consider its potential costs on the cognitive processes established during prior learning, as well as the potential individual differences in the ability to adjust the existing processing strategy according to the new instructions.