Effects of increased letter spacing on word identification and eye guidance during reading

Paterson, Kevin B.; Jordan, Timothy R.

doi:10.3758/mc.38.4.502

Cited by 63 publications

(98 citation statements)

References 58 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In contrast to the benefits seen with increases to inter-letter spacing reported by the above studies, Paterson and Jordan (2010) found a detrimental effect of increased spacing on eye movements when using the fixed width font Courier. However, in their experiment the smallest addition to inter-letter spacing added an extra space b e t w e e n e a c h l e t t e r and this most likely disrupted the overall integrity of the words in the sentences resulting in more serial letter processing.…”

Section: Inter-letter Spacing Vs Inter-word Spacingcontrasting

confidence: 96%

Interword and interletter spacing effects during reading revisited: Interactions with word and font characteristics.

Slattery¹,

Yates²,

Angele³

2016

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Despite the large number of eye movement studies conducted over the past 30+ years, relatively few have examined the influence that font characteristics have on reading. However, there has been renewed interest in 1 particular font characteristic, letter spacing, which has both theoretical (visual word recognition) and applied (font design) importance. Recently published results that letter spacing has a bigger impact on the reading performance of dyslexic children have perhaps garnered the most attention (Zorzi et al., 2012). Unfortunately, the effects of increased interletter spacing have been mixed with some authors reporting facilitation and others reporting inhibition (van den Boer & Hakvoort, 2015). The authors present findings from 3 experiments designed to resolve the seemingly inconsistent letter-spacing effects and provide clarity to researchers and font designers and researchers. The results indicate that the direction of spacing effects depend on the size of the default spacing chosen by font developers. Experiment 3 found that interletter spacing interacts with interword spacing, as the required space between words depends on the amount of space used between letters. Interword spacing also interacted with word type as the inhibition seen with smaller interword spacing was evident with nouns and verbs but not with function words.

show abstract

Section: Inter-letter Spacing Vs Inter-word Spacingcontrasting

confidence: 96%

Interword and interletter spacing effects during reading revisited: Interactions with word and font characteristics.

Slattery¹,

Yates²,

Angele³

2016

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Additionally, a consistent pattern of non-significant increases in fixation durations on narrow extent words, relative to wide extent words suggests, at most, a modest cost of visual (Bouma, 1970;1973;Paterson & Jordan, 2010) or informational density (e.g., Zang et al, 2013) in the narrow conditions.…”

Section: Ge Ne Ralndiscussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

The influence of a word’s number of letters, spatial extent, and initial bigram characteristics on eye movement control during reading: Evidence from Arabic.

Hermena

Liversedge

Drieghe

2017

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The authors conducted 2 eye movement experiments in which they used the typographical and linguistic properties of Arabic to disentangle the influences of words’ number of letters and spatial extent on measures of fixation duration and saccade targeting (Experiment 1), and to investigate the influence of initial bigram characteristics on saccade targeting during reading (Experiment 2). In the first experiment, through the use of a proportional font, which is more natural-looking in Arabic compared to monospaced fonts, the authors manipulated the number of letters (5 vs. 7) and the spatial extent (wide vs. narrow) of words embedded in frame sentences. The results obtained replicate and expand upon previous findings in other alphabetic languages that the number of letters influences fixation durations, whereas saccade targeting (as indicated by measures of fixation count and probability of skipping and refixation) is more influenced by the word’s spatial extent. In the second experiment, the authors compared saccade targeting measures (saccade amplitude and initial fixation location) in 6- and 7-letter words beginning with initial bigrams that were of extremely high frequency (ال the), relatively high frequency (لل to/for the), or beginning with the letters of the word stem. The results showed negligible modulation of saccade targeting by initial bigram characteristics. The results also highlighted the importance of selecting the appropriate measures of initial fixation location (spatial vs. character-based measures) during reading text rendered using proportional fonts.

show abstract

“…Here we employ an online word identification task, the lexical decision task, which is quite sensitive to small effects (see Ratcliff et al 2004, for a model of this task). As Rayner (1998) indicated, "researchers can have some confidence that results obtained with 1 For gaze durations, Paterson and Jordan (2010) reported a significant interaction between interletter spacing and word-frequency: low-frequency words were more hindered by increases of interletter spacing than high-frequency words. This was interpreted as an indication that interletter spacing affected the stage of visual identification -using Sternberg's additive-factor logic.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On the negative side, an increase in interletter spacing beyond some limits may be deleterious for the process of visual-word recognition (see Chung 2002;McLeish, 2007;Paterson & Jordan 2010;Perea & Rosa 2002): i) it may destroy the physical integrity of words (i.e., the words will cease to be identified as objects; e.g., as in the word literature), ii) it may affect word-form information which may be relevant in the process of lexical access (e.g., information on word-shape information, such as ascenders/descenders in the letters; see Perea & Rosa 2002;Yu, Park, Gerold, & Legge, 2010), iii) it may reduce the number of letters that can be recognized at a glance, in particular for long words (see Chung 2002), and iv) it may increase the distance of the letters from the center of the fovea so that retinal acuity will be reduced (see Paterson & Jordan 2010). As Chung (2002) indicated, "if fewer letters are contained in the visual span due to increased letter spacing, then reading slows down" (p. 1275).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Finally, a recent eyetracking experiment by Paterson and Jordan (2010) examined the role of interletter spacing (default vs. wide [one extra character] interletter spacing; e.g., "cuisine" vs. " ") for low-and high-frequency words embedded in sentences. For the sentences with increased interletter spacing, Paterson and Jordan employed a single interword spacing (e.g., " "), a double interword spacing (e.g., "…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The effects of interletter spacing in visual-word recognition

2011

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Despite the importance of determining the effects of interletter spacing on visual-word recognition, this issue has often been neglected in the literature. The goal of the present study is to shed some light on this topic. The rationale is that a thin increase in interletter spacing, as in c a s i n o, may reduce lateral interference among internal letters without destroying a word's integrity and/or allow a more precise encoding of a word's letter positions. Here we examined whether identification times for word stimuli in a lexical decision task were faster when the target word had a slightly wider than default interletter spacing value relative to the default settings (e.g., c a s i n o vs. casino). In Experiment 1, we examined whether interletter spacing interacted with word-frequency, whereas in Experiment 2, we examined whether interletter spacing interacted with word length. Results showed that responses to words using a thin increase in interletter spacing were faster than the responses to words using the default settings-regardless of word-frequency and word length. Thus, interletter spacing plays an important role at modulating the identification of visually presented words.

show abstract

Effects of increased letter spacing on word identification and eye guidance during reading

Cited by 63 publications

References 58 publications

Interword and interletter spacing effects during reading revisited: Interactions with word and font characteristics.

Interword and interletter spacing effects during reading revisited: Interactions with word and font characteristics.

The influence of a word’s number of letters, spatial extent, and initial bigram characteristics on eye movement control during reading: Evidence from Arabic.

The effects of interletter spacing in visual-word recognition

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About