Bernard Jean-Baptiste, Aguilar Carlos, Castet Eric
Aix-Marseille Université, Marseille, France.
Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive (UMR 7920), Fédération de Recherche 3C, CNRS, Marseille, France.
PLoS One. 2016 Apr 13;11(4):e0152506. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0152506. eCollection 2016.
Reading speed is dramatically reduced when readers cannot use their central vision. This is because low visual acuity and crowding negatively impact letter recognition in the periphery. In this study, we designed a new font (referred to as the Eido font) in order to reduce inter-letter similarity and consequently to increase peripheral letter recognition performance. We tested this font by running five experiments that compared the Eido font with the standard Courier font. Letter spacing and x-height were identical for the two monospaced fonts. Six normally-sighted subjects used exclusively their peripheral vision to run two aloud reading tasks (with eye movements), a letter recognition task (without eye movements), a word recognition task (without eye movements) and a lexical decision task. Results show that reading speed was not significantly different between the Eido and the Courier font when subjects had to read single sentences with a round simulated gaze-contingent central scotoma (10° diameter). In contrast, Eido significantly decreased perceptual errors in peripheral crowded letter recognition (-30% errors on average for letters briefly presented at 6° eccentricity) and in peripheral word recognition (-32% errors on average for words briefly presented at 6° eccentricity).
当读者无法使用其中心视力时，阅读速度会大幅降低。这是因为低视力敏锐度和拥挤效应会对周边字母识别产生负面影响。在本研究中，我们设计了一种新字体（称为Eido字体），以减少字母间的相似性，从而提高周边字母识别性能。我们通过进行五个实验来测试这种字体，这些实验将Eido字体与标准的Courier字体进行了比较。这两种等宽字体的字母间距和x高度相同。六名视力正常的受试者仅使用其周边视力进行两项朗读任务（有眼动）、一项字母识别任务（无眼动）、一项单词识别任务（无眼动）和一项词汇判断任务。结果表明，当受试者必须阅读带有圆形模拟注视相关中心暗点（直径10°）的单句时，Eido字体和Courier字体之间的阅读速度没有显著差异。相比之下，Eido显著减少了周边拥挤字母识别（在6°偏心度下短暂呈现的字母平均错误率降低30%）和周边单词识别（在6°偏心度下短暂呈现的单词平均错误率降低32%）中的感知错误。
