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Bouma

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Typography term For the surname, see Bouma (surname).

In typography, a bouma (/ˈboʊmə/ BOH-mə) is the shape of a cluster of letters, often a whole word. It is a reduction of "Bouma-shape", which was probably first used in Paul Saenger's 1997 book Space between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading, although Saenger himself attributes it to Insup & Maurice Martin Taylor. Its origin is in reference to hypotheses by the prominent vision researcher Herman Bouma, who studied the shapes and confusability of letters and letter strings.

Some typographers believe that, when reading, people can recognize words by deciphering boumas, not just individual letters, or that the shape of the word is related to readability and/or legibility. The claim is that this is a natural strategy for increasing reading efficiency. However, considerable study and experimentation by cognitive psychologists led to their general acceptance of a different, and largely contradictory, theory by the end of the 1980s: parallel letterwise recognition. Since 2000, parallel letterwise recognition has been more evangelized to typographers by Microsoft's Dr Kevin Larson, via conference presentations and a widely read article. Nonetheless, ongoing research (starting from 2009) often supports the bouma model of reading.

See also

References

  1. Bouma, H., (1971), "Visual Recognition of Isolated Lower-Case Letters", Vision Research, 11, 459-474.
    - Bouma, H., (1973), "Visual Interference in the Parafoveal Recognition of Initial and Final Letters of Words", Vision Research, 13, 762-782.
  2. Adams, M.J., (1979), "Models of word recognition", Cognitive Psychology, 11, 133-176.
    - McClelland, J.L. & Johnson, J.C. (1977), "The role of familiar units in perception of words and nonwords", Perception and Psychophysics, 22, 249-261.
    - Paap, K.R., Newsome, S.L., & Noel, R.W. (1984), "Word shape’s in poor shape for the race to the lexicon", Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 10, 413-428.
    - Rayner, K. (1975), "The perceptual span and peripheral cues in reading", Cognitive Psychology, 7, 65-81.
  3. Kevin Larson (20 October 2017). "The Science of Word Recognition". Microsoft. Retrieved 24 November 2019.
  4. Maximilian Riesenhuber (24 March 2015). "After Learning New Words, Brain Sees Them As Pictures". Georgetown University Medical Center. Retrieved 24 November 2019.
    - Laurie S. Glezer, Judy Kim, Josh Rule, Xiong Jiang, and Maximilian Riesenhuber (25 March 2015). "Adding Words to the Brain's Visual Dictionary: Novel Word Learning Selectively Sharpens Orthographic Representations in the VWFA" (PDF). The Journal of Neuroscience. 35 (12): 4965–4972. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4031-14.2015. PMC 4389595. PMID 25810526. Retrieved 24 November 2019.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

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