Bunkyo University, Faculty of Human Sciences
Bunkyo University, Faculty of Human Sciences(Graduate)
抄録
In addition to linguistic meaning, words also have other indicative information conveyed by the shape of letters. Therefore, changing the shape of letters with a different type of font creates a different impression of a word, even if the word is the same. The purpose of this study was to examine the facilitation and suppression resulting from the degree of the congruence between the meaning of words and the impression evoked by fonts in visual word recognition.
In experiments, the participant’s task was to react to words (Experiments 1 and 2) or to read texts aloud (Experiment 3). The meaning of words and the impression evoked by a font were either congruent or incongruent, and reaction time was measured as the interval between the start of the stimulus and when the participant pressed a key representing the same word as the stimulus. Results revealed neither facilitation nor suppression when the word was written in hiragana (Experiment 1). In contrast, facilitation was noted when the word was written in kanji, which had a greater degree of meaning as a result of the font shape than a word written in hiragana (Experiment 2). In addition, maximum reading speed, critical print size, and reading acuity were measured using the MNREAD-J when participants were shown both congruent and incongruent words and fonts (Experiment 3). Results revealed no facilitation nor suppression in any of the three indices.
These results indicate that facilitation of visual word recognition by the shape of a font is related to the semantic recognition process.