I'm interested if there are studies dealing with text understanding and POS (part of speech) coloring, or coloring syntactic/semantic information. The studies should solve the questions like:
Which combination of colors improve/deteriorate understanding and reading of texts?
How many colors should be in the scheme for positive/negative effects on reading and understanding of text? Which POSs should be preferably colored?
Are there types of people who are more efficient with/without coloring?
I believe that a few colors with good combination could be beneficial. Has somebody conducted research to test the effect of highlighting on reading comprehension?
An example:
On this text you can see that many colors that don't go together can make the reading process even worse and distracting. Can this be changed to improve the reading process, instead?
A few events inspired me in the following order:
- I started learning Chinese and their characters seem to have positive effect on my comprehension.
- I've read a NL (natural language) article in English in a programming editor. I was used to colors for various programming languages.
- I searched the Internet and found the article A case against syntax highlighting but don't agree with all the author's arguments or opinions. When you have only a few carefully chosen colors it's beneficial for programming so maybe could be for NL comprehension as well. A few colors could underline the basic thought and help to draw attention of the reader. When I read a scientific text for which I have not passion I'm often bored because don't know where it directs and colors and images help me a lot to concentrate and skimming over the basic thoughts could help with decision if it has sense to read it at all. This does not hold for fiction and poetry where we read for pleasure rather than getting information.