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| Word Recognition and the Bouma | | Date Created: 24 Oct, 2004, 05:24 PM |
 The article below was sent to me by fellow Font Geek, Scott Stoel.
Scott Stoel is the Digital Prepress Manager for ImageNation Graphics
Printing in Sioux Falls, SD. Scott is also a digital artist, freelance graphic designer and prepress consultant.
You can see more of his work at www.scottstoel.com
Character vs. Word Shape Readability
submitted by Scott Stoel
I found this page a while ago and I wished I had it when I was working for a children's book company.
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ctfonts/WordRecognition.aspx
It is a paper written by Kevin Larson about Advanced Reading Technology for Microsoft (try not to hold that against him) on type and word recognition from the perspective of a psychologist.
One of the issues I had to argue about when designing children's books was the issue of the readability of all words or headers set in all Uppercase letters. I was lucky that I had children in the reading age we were targeting so I had actual evidence that setting type in all uppercase letters did not matter, but it was still a sticking point. Today, the inferior readability of all caps is considered a truism among people that know about type (and especially those that don't know about type). I always begged to differ. This article states that connection between word shape and readability is vastly overrated.
Here is a quote that summed up the article for me:
"Word shape is no longer a viable model of word recognition. The bulk of scientific evidence says that we recognize a word's component letters, then use that visual information to recognize a word. In addition to perceptual information, we also use contextual information to help recognize words during ordinary reading, but that has no bearing on the word shape versus parallel letter recognition debate. It is hopefully clear that the readability and legibility of a typeface should not be evaluated on its ability to generate a good bouma shape."
Bouma is a synonym for word shape.
The article is full of all kinds of test data which supports Mr. Larson's contention, but in the end, it is nice to have some scientific proof that my suspicion was correct. |
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