The amount of learning material delivered to pupils and students on a daily basis through the screen of various digital devices is on the increase. 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 material is written down in. In this doctoral dissertation we investigated the effect of letter shape on readers’ emotional reactions, reading fluency, text understanding and text memorisation.
To find out whether age influences the perception of letter shape, we divided the readers participating in the research into two groups, i.e. less experienced readers – children (pupils of elementary school) and more experienced readers – adults (students). Both groups read 10 different texts in 10 different typefaces: 5 of them were round or in rounded shape, and 5 were angular or in pointed shape. The participants rated the pleasantness of the typeface and the imagined sweetness of letters. We also used an eye-tracking device to observe the reading speed as measure of reading fluency and changes in pupil size as an indicator of emotional response. The comprehension and memorisation of texts were checked immediately after the reading by asking two questions about the text content. The typefaces and texts used in the main study were collected through the first and second preliminary study. In the third preliminary study, we tested the testing method, which we refined a bit in the basic study.
The aim of our study was to determine the relationship between the letter shape and the subjectively perceived pleasantness of the font. We wanted to investigate whether the typeface shape or the feeling that the typeface is more pleasant has a positive influence on reading fluency, text comprehension and text memorisation.
We found that compared to angular letters or letters in pointed shape, round letters or letters in round shape evoked more pleasant feelings in the readers and resulted in higher reading speed and better understanding of the text. Children generally rated the pleasantness and sweetness of all typefaces higher than adults, and, as expected, read more slowly due to having less experience.
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.
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