In 1929 Sapir published a brief study from which he concluded that certain vocalic and consonantal sounds have a definite symbolic significance unrelated to the associative and linguistic value commonly attached to words.' His method consisted in presenting two 'unfamiliar' words (e.g. mal and mil), to which a meaning (e.g. 'table') was arbitrarily attached. His subjects reported whether mal symbolized a larger or a smaller table when compared with the word mil. The results indicated that there was a tendency for vowels near the a-end of the vocalic scale to imply 'largeness' and for those near the i-end to imply 'smallness,' quite apart from linguistic uses of these sounds. A like reference was also discovered for certain consonants.In the immediately preceding article in this JOURNAL S. S. Newman has, at the instance of Professor Sapir, again attacked the problem of phonetic symbolism, applying to his research a method of statistical treatment not used in the earlier study, and using a much larger body of material than the earlier study commanded.2 Newman's results generally confirm Sapir's earlier conclusions, making the interpretation much more specific. Newman again makes phonetic symbolism apply differentially to 'large' and 'small' and adds also the contrasting pair 'bright' and 'dark.' The distribution of his vowel-sounds and consonant-sounds upon the scale of magnitude (large-small) and the scale of brilliance (dark-light) leads him to believe that it is determined by such mechanical factors as position of the tongue in articulation, resonance within the mouth, the size of the oral cavity, and length of the vowel sound. Some differences in these factors with respect to their influence upon the two scales are thought to be significant.Upon the appearance of the first article, we were led to undertake a bit of experimentation upon the subject, partly to adapt the method to the psychological laboratory and partly to discover how far "phonetic

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In the literate adult, reading is a rapid, smooth-running, and highly automatized performance, which may go on for a long time without noteworthy lapse or hesitation. It appears to be a simple operation, but it is not. Even in highly practiced subjects it can scarcely be called "simple," because it depends upon the cooperation of a large number of heterogeneous conditions. In the first place, the constant readjustment of the eyes to the page is complicated. The leaps and pauses which the eyes make in reading involve a complex and delicate mechanism. Again, the total state of the central organ and its functional tendencies, taken together with the mental concomitants of attention, associability, and the touching off of meaning, form a second set of conditions upon which reading depends. And, finally, the apprehension of the written or printed characters rests upon a large number of local factors which may retard or facilitate the process. In the reading of print, for example, the color and lighting of the page and of the print, the size and form of the type, the length of the line and the spacing of the letters, all have their effect upon the rapidity and the ease of reading.These three sets of conditions, which we may roughly distinguish as peripheral, central and mental, and typographical, have suggested to psychology a great many problems. The conditions are all closely interrelated; but experimental progress has been made only when one factor or another has been isolated for study.1 In our present small investigation, we have tried to isolate one of the "typographical" conditions;2 the factor of 1 The psychology of reading has already acquired a large bibliography. Most of the older titles may be found in Huey, E. B., The psychology and pedagogy of reading, etc., New York, 1913. A number of recent pedagogical studies of reading are exemplified by the monograph, Gray, C. T., Types of reading ability, Chicago, 1917. 2 A partial list of "typographical" conditions, naming twelve factors of this sort, is given by Legros, L.

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