A blank look in reading: the effect of blank space on the identification of letters and words during reading.
Two experiments investigated the effect of visual blank space on reading by varying the amount of interletter and interline blank space in prose passages. Increasing interletter blank spacing slowed the reading process overall, presumably because it disrupted the unitization of words and word identification, but it also improved the identification of the letters within words. By contrast, increasing interline blank spacing sped up the reading process overall, while also improving the identification of words and the letters within words, presumably because the extra spacing reduced the amount of visual information that was processed during reading. The latter finding supports the conclusion that information from surrounding lines of single-spaced text may interfere with reading.
Van Overschelde
James P
JP
Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA. jimvano@psyc.umd.edu
Healy
Alice F
AF
D032882:Comprehension; D006801:Humans; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010700:Phonetics; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D012858:Size Perception; D013028:Space Perception