Lane Keeping and Sentence Comprehension Dual-task Performance

Abstract

Globalization in the automotive industry requires human factors research to consider drivers from different countries using different languages. As automotive companies are introducing new in-vehicle technologies to Chinese drivers, an important question is whether the results obtained from previous studies with English-speaking drivers can also be applied to Chinese drivers. The work reported in this paper compared lane keeping and sentence comprehension dual-task performances between drivers recruited from the U.S. and China. The dual-task experiments represented the scenarios of cruise-control driving while comprehending speech generated by in-vehicle auditory devices. The results showed that the Chinese drivers performed better in sentence comprehension than the American drivers in terms of higher correct rate. No significant difference was found between the lane keeping results of the two groups. In addition, a significant age effect on comprehension correct rate and a significant interaction involving gender were also identified. Implications and interpretations are discussed.