The most interesting part of reading this article was learning of the gap between established scientific knowledge and standard typographic practice. From the author's conclusion:
"During my first year with the (ClearType) team I gave a series of talks on relevant psychological topics, some of which instigated strong disagreement. At the crux of the disagreement was that the team believed that we recognized words by looking at the outline that goes around a whole word, while I believed that we recognize individual letters. In my young career as a reading psychologist I had never encountered a model of reading that used word shape as perceptual units, and knew of no psychologists who were working on such a model. But it turns out that the model had a very long history that I was unfamiliar with."
I wonder whether word recognition works differently for different languages.
E.g. more phonetic writing systems could tend to encourage looking at letters instead of the whole word. Or, do Chinese people read at the level of strokes or at the level of symbols or some other level?
The most interesting part of reading this article was learning of the gap between established scientific knowledge and standard typographic practice. From the author's conclusion: "During my first year with the (ClearType) team I gave a series of talks on relevant psychological topics, some of which instigated strong disagreement. At the crux of the disagreement was that the team believed that we recognized words by looking at the outline that goes around a whole word, while I believed that we recognize individual letters. In my young career as a reading psychologist I had never encountered a model of reading that used word shape as perceptual units, and knew of no psychologists who were working on such a model. But it turns out that the model had a very long history that I was unfamiliar with."