‘You can't see what the words say’: word spacing and letter spacing in children's reading books

Abstract

This paper describes two tests designed to find out whether children would be helped in their reading by the use of word and letter spacing that was looser or tighter than commonly used default values. In each test, 24 six-year-old children were asked to read aloud in a classroom; the realistic, high-quality test material was set using a range of either word spacing or letter spacing values. Audiotapes of the children's reading were analysed to determine reading rates; miscue analysis was used to compare the number and kind of errors they made on the different settings. The children were also asked for their views about the texts they read. The results suggest that children in the test groups did not benefit significantly from spacing that was substantially looser or tighter than our default values, and that they noticed differences in letter spacing more easily than differences in word spacing. This paper describes two tests concerned with evaluating the effect of larger and smaller amounts of horizontal space, in the form of letter and word spacing, on children's reading. Smith (1994) uses the term 'the visual information of print' when writing about distinctive features that help readers identify words and letters. A 'distinctive feature' relevant to the identification of words and letters in languages that use the Latin alphabet is the space that defines the boundary between one word and another or one letter and another. This use of space is one of the conventions of written English that children learn when they begin to read and write. Careful control of word and letter spacing helps to maintain horizontal cohesion within a line of type, and is one way typographers strive to make text easy to read. There are conventions for the use of horizontal space that vary according to tradition, context and reader expectation.Most typographers prefer relatively narrow word spacing. In the UK this practice was strongly endorsed in 1947 by Tschichold, who in defining rules for typesetting for Penguin Books wrote: 'All text composition should be closely word-spaced. As a rule, the spacing should be about y the thickness of an ''i'' in the type size used', and that 'All major punctuation marks -full point, colon, and semicolon -should be followed by the same spacing as is used throughout the rest of the line'. When Tschichold was writing, it was still the case that much continuous text setting used relatively wide word spacing, and some printers, along with most typists, used two word spaces after full points until well into the twentieth century. The Penguin composition rules reinforced good

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“…This theory is intuitively appealing. Reynolds and Walker (2004) examined whether six-year-old typical readers benefit from increased overall (letter) spacing or between-word spacing. To draw stronger conclusions about an explicit link between the effect of spacing and sensitivity to crowding effects in children with dyslexia, future research would have to include more explicit measures of crowding into research on reading.…”

“…In other words, in addition to increased letter spacing, an increased distance between words may help children with reading impairments to better determine when a new word starts. Reynolds and Walker (2004) examined whether six-year-old typical readers benefit from increased overall (letter) spacing or between-word spacing. Reading rate of the six-year olds did not significantly increase when either overall spacing or in-between-word spacing was increased.…”

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