Typography Meets Psycholinguistics: Tracking Type Styles During Reading

Typography aficionados may be surprised to find that language scientists are generally not very enthusiastic about the role of typography in reading. Especially from a psycholinguistic perspective, a range of variations in the global typographic form of texts has been consistently shown not to disrupt or affect reading substantially. As a result, type is typically deemed a low-level visual feature that does not impact on how readers parse or interpret language. Most of these studies, however, have neither investigated discrete, localized forms of typographic differentiation (e.g., CAPITALS, italics), nor properly considered the potential interaction of type and linguistic form.

In this study, I presented quantitative results from two eye-tracking experiments manipulating type styles discretely on named entities in English. I provided seminal evidence that, when used for emphasis in specific linguistic contexts, typography yields not only visual, but also emphatic, contrastive and referential effects that affect the way readers make sense of texts in real time during reading.