Bock J M, Monk A F, Hulme C
Department of Psychology, University of York, England.
Mem Cognit. 1993 Jan;21(1):81-8. doi: 10.3758/bf03211167.
Four experiments are presented in which printed texts are read for their meaning. Some of the texts were mutilated by altering the size of selected letters. In Experiments 1, 2, and 3, the number of words mutilated per passage and the number of letters changed per word were both manipulated. In all three experiments, reading was slowed as a function of the number of words changed per passage, while the number of letters changed per word had a much smaller effect. The interaction between the number of words and number of letters changed was not significant in any of the experiments. It is difficult to explain these results merely in terms of changes in the discriminability of letters. In Experiment 2 all uppercase text was used, which argues against an explanation in terms of supraletter features such as word envelope. We propose an explanation in terms of visual attention and the perceptual grouping required prior to feature recognition. The last experiment supports this explanation through the counterintuitive finding that adding letters of intermediate size can improve legibility by allowing grouping processes to associate large and small letters as belonging to the same word object.
本文呈现了四项实验，实验中要求阅读印刷文本以理解其含义。部分文本通过改变选定字母的大小进行了篡改。在实验1、2和3中，对每篇文章中被篡改的单词数量以及每个单词中被改变的字母数量都进行了操控。在所有这三项实验中，阅读速度随着每篇文章中被改变的单词数量而减慢，而每个单词中被改变的字母数量的影响则小得多。在任何一项实验中，单词数量和字母数量变化之间的交互作用都不显著。仅仅从字母可辨别性的变化角度很难解释这些结果。在实验2中使用的是全大写文本，这反驳了从诸如单词轮廓等超字母特征角度的解释。我们提出了一种基于视觉注意力以及特征识别之前所需的感知分组的解释。最后一项实验通过一个违反直觉的发现支持了这一解释，即添加中等大小的字母可以通过让分组过程将大写和小写字母关联为属于同一个单词对象来提高易读性。
