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

Abstract

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. (PsycINFO Database Record