Medved Tanja, Podlesek Anja, Možina Klementina
Faculty of Natural Sciences and Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Front Psychol. 2023 Feb 15;14:1107839. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1107839. eCollection 2023.
The amount of educational material delivered to pupils and students through digital screens is increasing. This method of delivering educational materials has become even more prevalent during the COVID-19 pandemic. To be as effective as possible, educational material must be properly designed not only in terms of content, but also in terms of form, e.g., the typeface. The present study investigated the effect of letter shape on readers' feelings of pleasantness during reading, reading fluency, and text comprehension and memorisation.
To find out whether age influences the effects of typeface shape on reading measures, we divided the participants into a group of less experienced readers (children) and more experienced readers (adults). Both groups read texts in eight different typefaces: four of them were round or in rounded shape, and four were angular or in pointed shape. With an eye-tracker, the reading speed and the number of regressive saccades were recorded as measures of reading fluency and changes in pupil size as an indicator of emotional response. After reading each text, the participants rated the pleasantness of the typeface, and their comprehension and memorisation of texts were checked by asking two questions about the text content.
We found that compared to angular letters or letters in pointed shape, round letters or letters in round shape created more pleasant feelings for readers and lead to a faster reading speed. Children, as expected, read more slowly due to less reading experiences, but, interestingly, had a similar number of regressive saccades and did not comprehend or remember the text worse than university students.
We concluded that softer typefaces of rounder shapes should be used in educational materials, as they make the reading process easier and thus support the learning process better for both younger and adult readers. The results of our study also showed that a comparison of findings of different studies may depend on the differences among the used letter shapes.
通过电子屏幕向中小学生和大学生提供的教育材料数量正在增加。在新冠疫情期间，这种提供教育材料的方式变得更加普遍。为了尽可能有效，教育材料不仅必须在内容方面进行适当设计，而且在形式方面，例如字体，也必须进行适当设计。本研究调查了字母形状对读者阅读时愉悦感、阅读流畅性以及文本理解和记忆的影响。
为了确定年龄是否会影响字体形状对阅读指标的影响，我们将参与者分为经验较少的读者组（儿童）和经验较丰富的读者组（成年人）。两组都阅读了八种不同字体的文本：其中四种是圆形或圆润形状的，四种是有棱角或尖形的。使用眼动仪记录阅读速度和回扫眼跳次数，作为阅读流畅性的指标，并记录瞳孔大小的变化，作为情绪反应的指标。在阅读完每篇文本后，参与者对字体的愉悦程度进行评分，并通过询问两个关于文本内容的问题来检查他们对文本的理解和记忆。
我们发现，与有棱角的字母或尖形字母相比，圆形字母或圆润形状的字母给读者带来更愉悦的感觉，并导致更快的阅读速度。正如预期的那样，由于阅读经验较少，儿童阅读速度较慢，但有趣的是，他们的回扫眼跳次数与大学生相似，并且对文本的理解和记忆并不比大学生差。
我们得出结论，教育材料应使用更圆润形状的柔和字体，因为它们使阅读过程更轻松，从而对年轻读者和成年读者的学习过程都有更好的支持。我们的研究结果还表明，不同研究结果的比较可能取决于所使用字母形状的差异。
