Boom Bouma!
So, we don't know the things we know. Kevin Larson set about destroying some of our favourite assertions in his talk 'The psychology of word recognition' on Saturday morning.
Posted on 27 September 2003 by Mark Barratt, Vancouver
The North Buliding lecture room was packed, with even the aged and eminent (including Robert Bringhurst, President Batty and your reporter) forced to sit on the floor for what promised to be some kind of showdown between the bean-counter psychologists and the humanist gestalt represented by the artist-craftsperson typography community.
In fact Kevin, a disgracefully young cognitive psychology graduate on Microsoft's Advanced Reading Techniques team, gave a quiet, assured, forensic dissection of the evidence which supports or undermines the three main hypotheses about how the recognition of words - and thus reading - happens.
There are:
1: Word-shape is critical in word-recognition
2: The reader recognbises each letter in turn (serially) and then assembles a word
3: The reader recognises each of the letters at the same time (in parallel) and assembles a word.
Kevin presented the evidence which supports and undermines or falsifies each of these propopositions, on the way addressing most of the objections which typographers are likely to raise.
The bottom line: on the weight of evidence, Kevin supports the 'parallel letter recognition' model. People don't he says, recognise whole-word shapes. Instead the recognise each of the letter components and then make a series of best-guesses on the information returned to assemble, first, phonemes and then words.
The clamour of questions about this was far too great for the time available: Kevin claims to be willing to continue the discussion in the corridors and ale-houses of Vancouver.
Incidentally, he noted that the word-recognition model is 'shorthanded' as 'Bouma' in the type community, which he finds puzzling. He points out that Bouma's research does not - and does not claim to - support the word-recognition model.
Kevin Larson’s reading list
ClearType research, much of which has not yet been published:
- Aten, T., Gugerty, L., & Tyrrell, R.A. (2002). Legibility of words rendered using ClearType. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 46th Annual Meeting, 1684-1687.
- Edmonds, K. A., Stephenson, A, Gugerty, L.J., & Tyrrell, R. A. (2003). ClearType increases users’ performance on a sentence comprehension task. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 47th Annual Meeting, In press.
- Larson, K. (2003). Individual differences in preference for color sub-pixel text rendering. Presentation at The 17th Symposium of the International Color Vision Society.
- Subbaram, M.V., Sheedy, J.E., & Hayes, J.R. (2003). Primary Parameters Affecting Font Legibility. To be published in Proceedings of the American Optometric Association.
- Tyrrell, R.A., Pasquale, T.B., Aten, T., & Francis, E.L. (2001). Empirical evaluation of user responses to reading text rendered using ClearType technologies. Society for Information Display 2001 Digest of Technical Papers, 1205-1207.
- Zimmerman, A.B., Sheedy, J.E., Subbaram, M.V., & Hayes, J.R. (2003). Font legibility – Effects of pixel density and smoothing. To be published in Proceedings of the American Optometric Association.
Legibility research
-
Adams (1979). Models of word recognition. Cognitive Psychology, 11,
133-176.
- Bouma (1973). Visual Interference in the Parafoveal Recognition of Initial and Final Letters of Words, Vision Research, 13, 762-782.
- Bouwhuis & Bouma (1979). Visual word recognition of three letter words as derived from the recognition of the constituent letters, Perception and Psychophysics, 25, 12-22.
- Cattell (1886). The time taken up by cerebral operations. Mind, 11, 277-282, 524-538.
- Fisher (1975). Reading and visual search. Memory and Cognition, 3, 188-196.
- Gough (1972). One second of reading. In Kavanagh & Mattingly’s Language by ear and by eye. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Haber & Schindler (1981). Errors in proofreading: Evidence of syntactic control of letter processing? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 7, 573-579.
- Hebb (1949). The organization of behavior. New York: Wiley.
- Mason (1978). From print to sound in mature readers as a function of reader ability and two forms of orthographic regularity, Memory and Cognition, 6, 568-581.
- McClelland & Johnson (1977). The role of familiar units in perception of words and nonwords. Perception and Psychophysics, 22, 249-261.
- McClelland & Rumelhart (1981). An interactive activation model of context effects in letter perception: Part 1. An account of basic findings. Psychological Review, 88, 375–407.
- McCulloch & Pitts (1943). A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity. Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, 5, 115-133.
- McConkie & Rayner (1975). The span of the effective stimulus during a fixation in reading. Perception and Psychophysics, 17, 578-586.
- Meyer & Gutschera (1975). Orthographic versus phonemic processing of printed words. Psychonomic Society Presentation.
- Monk & Hulme (1983). Errors in proofreading: Evidence for the use of word shape in word recognition. Memory and Cognition, 11, 16-23.
- Paap, Newsome, & Noel (1984). Word shape. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 10, 413-428.
- Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, & Patterson (1996). Understanding normal and impaired word reading: Computational principles in quasi-regular domains. Psychological Review, 103, 56–115.
- Pollatsek, Well, & Schindler (1975). Effects of segmentation and expectancy on matching time for words and nonwords. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1, 328-338.
- Rayner, McConkie, & Zola (1980). Integrating information across eye movements. Cognitive Psychology, 12, 206-226.
- Reicher (1969). Perceptual recognition as a function of meaningfulness of stimulus material. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 81, 275-280.
- Seidenberg, & McClelland (1989). A distributed, developmental model of word recognition and naming. Psychological Review, 96, 523–568.
- Smith (1969). Familiarity of configuration vs. discriminability of features in the visual identification of words. Psychonomic Science, 14, 261-262.
- Sperling (1963). A model for visual memory tasks. Human Factors, 5, 19-31.
- Woodworth (1938). Experimental psychology. New York; Holt.